Selects software to be used to assist rapid and precise identification of which seeds to preserve from some of the world's rarest plant species
Syngene announces that its GeneDirectory gel data storage and analysis software has been installed by the prestigious Millennium Seed Bank at Kew's Royal Botanic Gardens.
The software will be used as a tool, to assist rapid and precise identification of which seeds to preserve from some of the world's rarest plant species.
GeneDirectory has three ways of automatically comparing bands on different gels, ranging from simple band comparison to more complex co-dominance and dominance analysis.
Researchers at the Millennium Seed Bank intend to use GeneDirectory to reduce the repetitive manual comparison of thousands of different plant cDNA band patterns.
Many different patterns are produced by placing seeds under stress conditions such as temperature extremes.
The results can be exported directly to Excel spreadsheets, Word or as text files.
Millennium Seed Bank researchers believe the information gathered will eventually lead to the development of a general set of rules, concerning the successful selection of seeds for long term storage.
Peter Toorop, senior scientific officer at the Millennium Seed Bank, explained: "Maintaining a bank of viable seeds is important to mankind because some plant species may soon be extinct.
With the Millennium Seed Bank we do not only save species, but also potentially valuable properties such as untapped medicinal components." Dr Toorop added: "We chose GeneDirectory to help with this vital research because it looked simple to operate.
Since we already use a Syngene GeneGnome system for our chemiluminescent image capture and analysis, we were certain Syngene could provide the right software for cDNA analysis work too." The Millennium Seed Bank Project is an international collaborative plant conservation initiative.
This world-wide effort aims to safeguard 24,000 plant species from around the globe against extinction and has already successfully secured the future of virtually all the UK's native flowering plants.
The Millennium Seed Bank Project is staffed by the Seed Conservation Department of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and is supported by the Millennium Commission, The Wellcome Trust and Orange. .
(This was Laboratorytalk's Top Story on 21 January 2003)
