2 April 2014 - 2 April 2014 - The US University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMMC) said yesterday that its Institute for Genome Sciences had won a research programme contract from the US FDA to sequence, assemble and annotate a population of bacterial pathogens to expand a vetted public reference database.

The institute will perform genome sequencing utilising two complementary high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies, namely Illumina and Pacific Biosciences, as well as will use numerous genome assembler software packages and assembly QA/QC pipelines to assemble and validate the emerging draft genome sequences. The sequencing platforms will allow the researchers to cross-validate consensus sequences to produce the highest possible genome sequence accuracy.

The inclusion of the annotated genome sequences in the database will allow high confidence confirmation of in-vitro microbial pathogen detection. The database will be accessed via the collection of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)'s public domain databases. Combining genomic data and metadata will drive the development of HTS-based in-vitro diagnostics and the evaluation of their potential.

According to Claire Fraser, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences, the database will provide an important reference for the scientific and medical diagnostic communities.