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December 14, 2007
Dear Users of the Maize TILLING Project,
Over the past couple of years the community has been
tremendously supportive of our efforts to provide point
mutant alleles for use in functional genomics and gene
characterization. We will continue to improve and expand
our ability to return more alleles to you and seed carrying
those alleles for your research with shorter turnaround.
An essential component in our project has been NSF
funding over the past few years as we got MTP established
and running. One part of that support has been to subsidize
the ~$3000 cost of TILLING a gene target so that the
user fee we have to charge could remain low as we introduced
this technology to the community. The goal all along
has been that NSF would eventually remove these price
supports once the community began using the facility
and user fees could support our operations. This is
the same approach that has been taken for the Seattle
TILLING Project, which is now operating busily without
NSF support.
When our NSF grant was
funded, it was contingent on our becoming fully self-sufficient
by the end of the award (Aug 14, 2008). MTP has been
phasing these increases in gradually. Our next price
increase will occur on January 1st, 2008 and TILLING
will cost $2500 per target. Please note that this
fee will now include Eco-TILLING 96 Maize Diversity
Lines and we will continue our policy of screening until
we have satisfied our delivery algorithm.
Purdue University has
purchased a next generation sequencer (ABI SOLiD) and
we are developing protocols to use the ABI SOLiD for
mutation detection. With this new technology we will
be able to screen entire genes and should have better
success screening GC-rich targets. By analyzing several
gene targets per machine run we hope to get the cost
of screening our EMS mutant populations to ~ $1000 -
1500 per gene. We will have more details on our progress
at the 2008 Maize Meeting.
We appreciate your understanding and support of the
project, and look forward to continuing our service
to the functional genomics efforts of the community.
Sincerely,
The Maize TILLING Project
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