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August 14, 2008
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.
Our NSF grant has ended and the Maize TILLING Project is now a full cost recovery service. Maize TILLING requests are now $3000 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. We will review our costs estimates every six months and make adjustments as needed.
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 are working with the genomics staff at Purdue to smooth out some of the issues we found with our pilot experiments. We are working towards implementing the ABI SOLiD protocols early this fall.
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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