NCGR President Stephen Kingsmore said the center has received funding for a new sequencer, and is considering platforms from a number of vendors, including those by 454 Life Sciences, Solexa, and Applied Biosystems.
Known primarily as a center for bioinformatics research, NCGR has received $600,000 in state funding to establish the center and is seeking another $1.1 million in federal funds.
“Medical resequencing is a natural extension of 14 years of experience by NCGR in software development for DNA sequence analysis,” Kingsmore said in a statement last week.
The NCGR will focus on medical re-sequencing to study human diseases and characteristics of crops prevalent in New Mexico, such as soybeans and peanuts. Two years ago NCGR received $1.2 million to build a database of legume information and bioinformatics and software from the US Department of Agriculture.
New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici, who helped the center secure funding when it started in 1994, is a former chairman of two Department of Energy committees, and Kingsmore said he will petition Washington for the federal money.