St. Louis, Missouri, and Cold Spring Harbor, New York
September 12, 2003

Orion Genomics, LLC and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) announced today an arrangement whereby CSHL will use Orion’s proprietary GeneThresher® sorghum sequences to annotate the genomes of rice and other grasses for the public domain. CSHL and Orion Genomics published today the first release on the CSHL www.gramene.org Web site. In 2003, Orion scientists will double the present amount of sorghum sequence and together with CSHL are planning a second annotation of the rice genome to be release early in 2004.

“The Gramene site is a world-class Web-accessible data resource for comparative genome analysis of grasses,” said Nathan Lakey, President and Chief Executive Officer of Orion Genomics. “The grass family of plants is responsible for much of the food production world wide and includes important crops such as corn, rice, wheat, barley, and sorghum. Gene research in the grasses, facilitated by web sites such as Gramene, will lead to improvements in agriculture including increased resistance to environmental stress such as drought and protection from pests.” While the underlying GeneThresher® sorghum sequences are proprietary to Orion, the annotations resulting from comparison with these gene-enriched sequences are being posted on the Gramene web site and used to annotate the rice genome. A draft of the rice genome sequence was completed in the public sector in December 2002 by an international consortium led by Japan, and supported in the USA by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Agriculture.

“Comparative genomics is proving to be a powerful tool for identifying the correct gene models across the cereal species, and today's release of the alignments of the sorghum data to the rice genome is an important step in the public research community's understanding of the genomes of rice and related grasses,” said Lincoln Stein, Associate Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “I am very grateful to Orion Genomics for making its privately-held data set available in a way that allows the public research sector to benefit from it, and I am very proud of the role that the Gramene resource has played in this process.”

Orion Genomics, LLC, located at the Center for Emerging Technologies in St. Louis, Missouri, is a profitable biotechnology company, developing and commercializing intellectual property and advanced genome analysis tools. The scientific staff and the company’s founders are pioneers in genome and DNA methylation technologies. Orion’s first DNA methylation-based technology, trademarked as GeneThresher®, provides for the efficient sequencing of plant genomes. Orion’s second DNA methylation-based technology, trademarked as MethylScope™, is the first high-throughput technique capable of comprehensively detecting changes in DNA methylation on microarrays, and will have applications in cancer, obesity, diabetes, autoimmune disease, psychiatric disorders, plant sciences, and biodefense.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is recognized internationally for its excellence in basic research (including plant biology, cancer and neurobiology) as well as a wide range of educational activities that include extensive postgraduate courses and a Ph.D. program in the Watson School of Biological Sciences. The Laboratory also hosts numerous scientific meetings each year attended by more than 6,500 biologists from around the world. The laboratory is headed by Director and CEO Bruce Stillman and President James D. Watson.