NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Canada's Genome Prairie has received C$2.4 million ($2.3 million) from the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture for several genomics research projects, including flax genomics and an agricultural genomics products commercialization project.
The funding will be split into four projects including the C$1.2 million for the Total Utilization of Flax Genomics (TUFGEN) project; C$680,000 for the commercialization project, called Value Generation through Genomics (VALGEN); C$470,000 for a project with the National Research Council's Plant Biotechnology Institute in Saskatoon called Synthetic Biosystems for the Production of High Value Plant Metabolites; and C$77,200 for a project with the University of Manitoba called Microbial Genomics for Biofuels and Bioproducts.
"VALGEN will help new products and technologies realize their economic and social potential," VALGEN's project leader, Peter Philips of the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, said in a statement. "The project will also help identify solutions to problems that may arise."
TUFGEN's co-leader, Gordon Rowland of the University of Saskatchewan College of Agriculture and Bioresources, said that the project aims to develop flax as a dual-purpose crop and to sequence the flax genome.