The University of Arizona
Helping to Solve the 9 Billion-People Question
PacBio Sequencing
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Institute Profile
The Arizona Genomics Institute (AGI) was formed in 2002 when Dr. Rod A. Wing joined the School of Plant Sciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The primary focus of AGI is in the area of structural, evolutionary and functional genomics of crop plants where it has played significant roles in over 30 plant and animal genome projects. AGI is divided into 4 Centers each lead by a Center Leader (BAC/EST Library Construction & Resource Center, Sequencing & Physical Mapping Center [including: production sequencing and fingerprinting, and sequence finishing], Bioinformatics Center, and the Evolutionary and Functional Genomics Center). AGI is housed in the state of the art Thomas W. Keating Bioresearch Building on the northeast part of the UA campus near the Arizona Health Science Center. AGI currently employees about 10 scientists and is primarily funded through federal grants, private contracts, and the Bud Antle Endowed Chair in Plant Molecular Genetics.
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AGI is an Approved PacBio Certified Service Provider

The Arizona Genomics Institute recently acquired a Pacific Biosciences Sequel state-of-the-art long-read sequencing instrument that is now available for service project sequencing. AGI has developed robust pipelines for sequencing whole genomes, transcriptomes and BAC clones. Pacbio sequencing uses Single Molecule Real Time sequencing of large templates to produce extremely long reads.
@ AGI
Centers
Research
Services
Resources
BAC/EST Resources Available for Distribution
Libraries: 365
Clones: 15,083,328
Recent News
ABOR Confirms Five New Regents' Professors at UA Posted by webmaster
The Arizona Board of Regents on April 11 confirmed the appointments of University of Arizona faculty members Alfred McEwen, John Rutherfoord, Dr. Marvin Slepian, Rod Wing and Lucy Ziurys as Regents' Professors.

The title of Regents’ Professor is reserved for full professors whose exceptional achievements merit national and international distinction. Regents' Professor appointments are limited to no more than 3 percent of the total number of the university’s tenured and tenure track faculty members.

Rod Wing has had a remarkable career in plant science. To read the information that plant genomes carry, their DNA must be turned into libraries: cut into shorter, overlapping pieces and inserted into vectors that can be propagated, stored and, most importantly, precisely sequenced. In the early 1990s, when the field of genomics began to explode, most available vectors were based on yeast artificial chromosomes, which were nimble enough to accommodate very large pieces of DNA but had the inconvenient habit of rearranging the inserted DNA in ways that no longer mirrored its original structure. This serious hurdle was overcome when Wing developed BACs – artificial chromosomes based on bacteria rather than yeast. Many years have passed, but BACs remain the cornerstone on which DNA libraries from plants and all sorts of other organisms are still constructed.

Armed with unique tools, several of which he developed, Wing moved on to tackle one of the most formidable challenges in plant sciences: the sequencing on the genome of rice, a crop eaten daily by more than 3 billion people worldwide. Wing was the U.S. leader of the 10-nation team that sequenced the rice genome, the completion of which was announced in Tucson in November 2004 and published in Nature in 2005. Rice was the first crop genome to be sequenced and remains the highest-quality genome available for any crop.

Since 2005, Wing has continued his work on many other genome projects including maize, Drosophila, or the common fruit fly, and the wild relatives of rice.

Wing has been recognized by numerous awards, including being elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science this year. He is director of the Arizona Genomics Institute and the Bud Antle Endowed Chair Professor in the School of Plant Sciences' Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the UA College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

His commitment to excellence is also revealed by his service and teaching record at the UA. He has taught several undergraduate Honors Colloquia, all centered on understanding and solving the problem of feeding the world’s growing population. He is also dedicated to outreach for elementary school students and their families, and introduces them to the plant sciences at Plant Science Family Nights.


https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/abor- ... new-regents-professors-ua
How can we solve world hunger with rice?
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A portion of AGI's material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 102620.