Inqaba biotec, reseller of CLC bio products, has finalised a contract with the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) in South Africa, to install CLC bio's enterprise platform across several locations.
In order to address the ARC's key strategic areas of improving food security, increasing crop productivity and management of responses to climate change, the ARC has created a central biotechnology platform that concentrates all its high-throughput sequencing and high-performance computing capabilities for agricultural research in one integrated department.
Head of the Biotechnology Platform at the ARC, Dr Jasper Rees, said: 'We selected CLC bio's enterprise platform as it provides the ideal client/server environment we need to distribute bioinformatics and genomics tools across our organisation in all of South Africa.
'Coupled with a newly installed Illumina Hiscan, our biotechnology platform now has a great capability and flexibility within a wide range of areas, such as de novo sequencing, re-sequencing, transcriptome sequencing and viral metagenomics.
According to Inqaba biotec, it is experiencing a substantial interest from a broad range of organisations in South Africa, as well as the rest of Africa, to invest in bioinformatics for analysis of next-generation sequencing data.
The ARC plans to apply these new technologies to a wide range of crops and animals, exploring complex systems such as drought tolerance using quantitative gene expressions, map genome sequences for indigenous vegetable crops and identify and characterise unknown pathogens from animals or plants.
