New Developments

New species

We offer our research and development services to establish DArT for any plant species. We are also in the process of developing R&D capability in other systems (animals, microorganisms, complex DNA samples).

The framework of interaction for the development of our technology for a new species is very flexible. We have a good track record of productive interactions with different organisations, including non-profit international agricultural research centres, professional organisations of the Australian agricultural industries, and the for-profit private sector.

Animals

We are currently developing DArT for two animal species of agricultural importance: cattle and sheep. These efforts are building upon the initial proof-of-concept work on the mouse genome (D. Jaccoud, PhD thesis). Large differences in genome organisation between plants and animals demand a significant change in the way complexity reduction is performed on these genomes. Fortunately, the complete genomic sequences and large SNP databases available for a few animal species provide an opportunity to support this work by "in silico DArT".

Microorganisms

Microorganisms, including fungi and bacteria, represent the most significant biotic stresses for crop production, but are also beneficial components of agro-ecological systems. The ability to genetically characterise microorganisms is as important as characterising crops affected by them. Genetic fingerprints of microbial isolates may help to predict their virulence or beneficial effects on plant growth.

We initiated work on DArT for microbial genomes several years ago, initially in the context of detecting the presence of microbial DNA in plant DNA extracts (Jaccoud et al, 2001). Next, Andrew Craig, a visitor from the South Australian Research and Development Institute, applied DArT to characterise diversity patterns of fungal pathogens of barley (netblotch, scald). At present, Alexander Wittenberg, a visitor from Plant Research International is testing DArT as a high-density mapping tool for Mycosphaerella Graminicola. The work on specific microbial isolates has been a useful entry point into applying DArT to complex DNA samples, such as DNA extracted from soil or water.

New services

We will develop additional services, value-adding data processing whereby it will provide various graphical views of the data, build genetic maps, identify linkages, etc., according to customers' requirements.

We also want to be responsive to customers' needs and welcome any input on data format of interest to customers. A web-based electronic data delivering system is under development.

Read more about DNA methylation profiling.