NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – French biotech firm Biogemma said today that it is collaborating with GenomeQuest and SGI to develop high-performance computing solutions for agriculture genomics.
Biogemma said that under the alliance it has already deployed a GenomeQuest product for sequence data management and analysis on SGI's Altix UV 1000 supercomputer. Financial terms of the alliance were not disclosed.
"With the advent of next-generation sequencing, our data delivery rate for species of interest is approaching hundreds of Gigabases per month, and we will be dealing in Terabytes by the end of 2011," Olivier Dugas, head of upstream genomics for Biogemma, said in a statement. "With this collaboration and the unique technologies from GenomeQuest and SGI, our researchers are equipped to handle these huge data sets and perform the complex analytical processes that will lead to powerful genomic-based discoveries."
Initial crops targeted by the collaboration include maize, wheat, canola, and sunflower.
The collaboration builds on a partnership between GenomeQuest and SGI announced earlier this year for a common software/hardware architecture for whole- and multi-genome analysis, optimized for next-generation sequencing scale.
In a separate announcement today, Biogemma and the Plant Sciences Group of Wageningen University and Research Centre said that they will collaborate on research and development for drought tolerance in wheat.
"The license agreement with Wageningen UR allows us to reinforce our wheat trait portfolio with a number of drought tolerance genes," Biogemma CEO Pascual Perez said in a statement.