First U.S. Center to Focus on Medical Resequencing to Open in New Mexico.

SciTech21-12 January 2007-First U.S. Center to Focus on Medical Resequencing to Open in New Mexico(C)2007 JeraOne - http://www.jeraone.com

The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMT) in Socorro and the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR) in Santa Fe announced a partnership to create the New Mexico Genome Sequencing Center (NMGSC).

The state of New Mexico has provided $600,000 in funding to establish the Center, which will be located at NCGR in Santa Fe. The NMGSC will be the first in the nation to focus on medical resequencing.

Medical resequencing is a new approach for discovery of the genetic

basis of common human diseases or important crop traits and refers to the large-scale sequencing of the genome of individuals affected by a disease or with a trait of interest.

Medical sequencing is being made possible by next-generation DNA sequencing instruments and software that are increasing the speed and throughput of DNA sequencing.

"The New Mexico Genome Sequencing Center is being established to serve the needs of researchers at all New Mexico universities and research institutes," said Dr. Daniel H. Lopez, president of NMT. "The NMGSC will focus on problems that are important to New Mexicans."

Initial NMGSC programs include sequencing the genome of the major pathogen of chile crops and the Schizophrenia Genome Project.

Chile pathogen sequencing is being undertaken in collaboration with the Joint Genome Institute of the Department of Energy, Walnut Creek, Calif., and 454 LifeSciences Inc., New Haven, Conn., and is funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

The Schizophrenia Genome Project is being undertaken in collaboration with the MIND Institute and University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, N.M.

"Medical resequencing is a natural extension of 14 years of experience by NCGR in software development for DNA sequence analysis," said Dr. Stephen F. Kingsmore, president of NCGR. "We believe that the NMGSC will attract biotechnology and pharmaceutical interest to the region."

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