Four world-class research teams have recently begun putting Geneious Server™ through its paces. Our private beta partners are research teams lead by Dr. Charles Chiu at the University of California San Francisco, Associate Professor, Dr. David Edwards at the University of Queensland, Director of Scientific Computing, Dr. Ji He at the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation and Associate Director, Dr. Mark Wall at Verenium Corporation. Research teams at each of these facilities have deployed Geneious Server and have begun testing the NGS and Phylogenetics modules. Their valuable feedback will ensure Geneious Server is a reliable, useful and robust platform when it becomes available later this year.

Geneious Server to help sequence the wheat genome

One of the key Geneious Server private beta testers is Associate Professor David Edwards and his team at the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics at the University of Queensland.

Following recent success characterizing the Brassica genomes in partnership with Bayer CropScience, BGI and KeyGene, David is moving on to an even bigger challenge: developing processes to characterize very large crop genomes. In particular, the polyploid bread wheat genome – a genome six times larger than the human genome. “These key crops are of great importance to farmers in Australia and around the world. Knowing the sequence for large genome cereal crops would revolutionize crop improvement, allowing breeders to select optimal parents for crop improvement,” says David.

To handle the challenge, the University of Queensland has built high performance computers designed specifically for the assembly of Illumina GAII genome sequencing data and developed their own assembler known as ‘SaSSY’ Geneious Server will manage the project’s huge volumes of data. A key part of the project is optimising SaSSY for the highly repetitive regions found in the wheat genome. David's team plan to eventually release SaSSY and many other tools as plugins for Geneious. “We want to get our tools out there in the most useful and user-friendly way possible. Geneious provides an easy to use interface, visualizations and great support, so we can focus on the algorithms and research,” David says.