As part of its promise to make the rice genome data available to researchers worldwide, Syngenta said it would negotiate ways it can help the international public sequencing consortium gain access to it.
This could be a big boost to the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project, which may require an additional $80 million to $100 million in funding and may not be complete until 2004, according to Rod Wing, a researcher at Clemson involved in the public effort to sequence the genome.
Wing said that access to Syngenta’s data could speed up the public effort by a year or two.
Steve Briggs, president of TMRI, said, “We’re looking at ways that we could accelerate their efforts without compromising Syngenta’s commercial competitiveness.”
Briggs does not see his company in competition with the public rice genome project. “Their goal is to get an accuracy level that is tenfold higher than ours,” he said. “And ours is only 99.5 percent accurate.”
The chart below graphs the current status of the IRGSP effort.
