KeyGene and University of Minnesota jointly have entered a strategic licensing agreement, which allows the university to offer KeyGene’s proprietary Sequence-Based Genotyping (SBG) along with a complete suite of genomics services to the academic community and the industry.
The SBG technology allows rapid and cost-effective discovery and scoring of genetic variation for improvement of crops without prior knowledge of their genomic sequences. According to the company, this technology facilitates genome-wide SNP discovery and genotyping is in a single experiment.
“The University of Minnesota Genomics Center is excited to now be able to offer Sequence-based Genotyping not only to our local
researchers, but also to external customers in academia and industry,” says Kenneth Beckman, director of the University of Minnesota Genomics Center. “SBG will complement the PCR-based, arraybased,
and mass-spec based genotyping platforms we currently operate, by permitting rapid turnaround, and very cost-effective genotyping of any species, especially those for which there are no well-established reference maps or commercially-available targeted reagents.
“Our goal is to provide a complete sample-to-genotype workflow, including bioinformatic analysis and high-throughput DNA extraction when needed. We plan to incrementally improve our SBG
wet-lab and informatic workflows in order to lower costs and improve coverage, and to thereby enable increasingly ambitious population-genetic and breeding strategies for our users.”
KeyGene reports it has established a strong proprietary position on SBG with world-wide IP protection and this collaboration fully enables investigators from industry and academia to advance their research programs through SBG.
“KeyGene’s leadership in the industry stands on the foundations of its core beliefs in innovation and translation,” says Fayaz Khazi, CEO of KeyGene USA. “SBG is a transformative technology that can rapidly advance breeding programs across the globe. We are proud to make
SBG available through UMGC to foster research and drive further discoveries in crop, animal and life science.”
