NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Bioinformatics firm Genestack announced today that it has received a £90,000 ($138,300) grant from Innovate UK to collaborate with Rothamsted Research on the development of agri-genomic technologies for crop improvement.
The partners will initially collaborate on a feasibility study looking at ways to optimize the use of high-throughput bioinformatics in genomics-based crop improvement and crop protection. By combining Rothamsted's QTLNetMiner gene-discovery tool with Genestack's bioinformatics platform, the two aim to ultimately develop an integrated multi-omics data management, pre-processing, and interpretation service that can be marketed to large agricultural companies.
"Food security is becoming a major global challenge and traditional techniques to improve crops simply cannot keep pace with a rapidly changing environment," Genestack CEO Misha Kapushesky said in a statement. "Through this grant and the partnership with Rothamsted Research, we are now well placed to expand our offering into the agri-genomics sector, beyond our traditional sector of human health."
"We hope that this project will be the start of a long-term alliance with Genestack that will translate our novel network-bioinformatics solutions into a platform that can be readily used to accelerate research in the agri-tech research and development sector," Chris Rawlings, head of computational and systems biology at Rothamsted, added.