St. Louis, Missouri
September 26, 2002

Orion Genomics, LLC announced today their role in a collaborative research project led by the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, who received $5.92 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund the project. The research will both generate data immediately applicable for crop improvement research and will help determine the future of gene enrichment technologies in the corn genome-sequencing project.

The effort led by the Danforth Center, in collaboration with researchers at Purdue University, The Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, as well as Orion Genomics in St. Louis, Missouri, is one of two awards announced by the NSF to accelerate comprehensive corn genome sequencing. The second award will be led by Rutgers University.

In a statement announcing NSF's funding of the gene sequencing project led by the Danforth Center and Rutgers University, Mary Clutter, the Assistant Director for Biological Sciences at NSF, said, "This project will give us the first snapshot view of the sequence organization of the maize genome. It will pave the way for future whole genome sequencing efforts. It will also be the model for sequencing other large complex genomes." (Please see http://nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/02/pr0275.htm for more information.)

"We are excited to be leading one of these two new important efforts to sequence genes in maize, which is both a classical genetic model for plant research and an economically important crop," said Danforth Center president Roger N. Beachy.

The genomes of crops range in size from one-tenth to six times the size of the human genome making it costly to employ whole-genome methods used in the past. Gene enrichment approaches were first shown in 1999 by two of Orion's founders, Cold Spring Harbor professors Robert Martienssen and W. Richard McCombie, to remove highly repetitive "junk" DNA, which makes up 87% of the corn genome. These technologies will likely provide a cost-effective plant genome-sequencing methodology.

"We are thrilled that the NSF has funded the Danforth Center's application to sequence the corn genome using two different gene enrichment technologies, one of which has been licensed exclusively from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to Orion Genomics. The second is under development by researchers at Purdue," said Nathan Lakey, President and CEO of Orion Genomics. "We are confident that the cost savings offered by gene enrichment strategies will set the stage for future plant genome projects."

Orion Genomics, LLC, located at the Center for Emerging Technologies in St. Louis, Missouri, is a biotechnology company, which focuses on the role of DNA methylation in the life sciences. Orion's first commercial technology, GeneThresher™, provides rapid discovery of genes responsible for important agronomic traits in crops such as corn, wheat and soybean at a fraction of the cost and time of alternative gene discovery methods.

Additional information about the Danforth Center Maize Genomics Consortium at: http://maize.danforthcenter.org/.