NEW YORK — Arbor Biosciences said today that it has signed an agreement to offer Curio Genomics' bioinformatics platform with an exome panel being developed for the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC).
The IWGSC was launched in 2005 by an international group of scientists from academia, industry, and government agencies to develop a reference genome for bread wheat variety Chinese Spring, which it published about a year ago. In January, Arbor — which was recently acquired by Chiral Technologies — partnered with IWGSC to develop additional resources for bread wheat research including a standardized exome panel.
Under the terms of the deal between the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based companies, Arbor will offer Curio's bioinformatics analysis platform alongside its myBaits Expert wheat exome capture panel — which is slated for launch later this month — either as standalone products or together through its MyReads next-generation sequencing service.
Additional terms were not disclosed.
"The IWGSC is committed to ensuring that the wheat breeders have state-of-the-art genomic resources," IWGSC Executive Director Kellye Eversole said in a statement. "In this partnership, our members, as well as the scientific community, will benefit from having access to a unified analysis platform [that] streamlines data sharing and can facilitate comparative analyses across the consortium."