The International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium announced that the bioinformatics company Curio Genomics has joined the organization as a sponsoring partner.
The IWGSC is an international, collaborative consortium of wheat growers, plant scientists, and public and private breeders dedicated to the development of genomic resources for wheat scientists and breeders to facilitate the production of wheat varieties better adapted to today’s challenges such as climate change, food security and biodiversity preservation.
Curio Genomics provides a fully integrated, modern big data platform explicitly designed to rapidly and seamlessly analyze large and complex plant genomes, such as wheat. In addition, the Curio platform is biologist-friendly, providing dynamic real-time data visualizations that empower researchers to ask more questions, leading to faster discovery.
In 2018, the IWGSC published the first reference sequence (RefSeq) of the bread wheat variety Chinese Spring, an essential tool to identify genes and regulatory elements underlying complex agronomic traits such as yield, grain quality, resistance to diseases, and tolerance to stress such as drought or salinity. Since then, the reference sequence was further improved and a new version, RefSeq v2.1, was released to the community in April 2021.
In 2019, Curio teamed up with the IWGSC and Daicel Arbor Biosciences to integrate the Chinese Spring wheat RefSeq into the platform allowing for the analysis of samples utilizing Arbor’s myBaits Expert Wheat Exome capture panel. Today, Curio and Arbor have partnered to offer a fully integrated and flexible myCurio solution, making wheat genomic research fast and efficient, including support for the IWGSC RefSeq v2.1.
“Curio is delighted to sponsor IWGSC to demonstrate our continued commitment to its important work and that of the entire wheat research community,” said Curio’s executive chairman, John Prista Freshley.
Sponsors are an essential part of the IWGSC. They participate in IWGSC-led projects and, as members of the Coordinating Committee, they help shape the IWGSC priorities, strategic plans, and activities. Curio’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Shawn Quinn, will represent Curio in the IWGSC Coordinating Committee.
“We are very pleased to further our collaboration with Curio and have Shawn Quinn join the Coordinating Committee”, said Kellye Eversole, IWGSC Executive Director. “Their bioinformatics platform has proven to be user friendly and extremely useful to breeders, including small and mid-size entities, desiring to accelerate their breeding programs. We look forward to working with them to develop even more tools and resources for the wheat community.”
