The project entitled „The application of Next-Generation Sequencing technology for the detection and diagnosis of non-culturable organism: Viruses and viroids“ is financially supported in the frame of Euphresco - Network for phytosanitary research coordination and funding.
The overall goal of this Euphresco project is the development and adaptation of standardised Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies for the detection and identification of viruses and viroids.
This includes the development of standardised methods for nucleic acid preparations that are cheap, reliable and applicable to a broad range of plant material (e.g. leaves, stems, roots, fruits from various crops) and the preparation of the nucleic acids extracts for NGS (library preparation). In addition, common bioinformatic pipelines shall be adapted or developed to allow reliable and quick analysis of NGS data. Furthermore, the developed protocols will be validated by inter-laboratory comparisons and compared in terms of sensitivity and specificity with standard diagnostic techniques. Reference sequence data will be used to optimise the bioinformatic pipelines and will be made available to public databases such as Q-bank.
The EUPHRESCO project (2015-F-172) is coordinated by the Julius Kühn Institute (Dr. Heiko Ziebell, Institute for Epidemiology and Pathogendiagnostics). Most of the17 partners from 16 countries (Europe, South and North America as well as South Africa) met last week at the JKI Braunschweig to inform about the current state of NGS technologies in their countries and discussed six working packages.
Project duration: 1st July 2016 – End of June 2018
This project has an overall budget of 620,000 Euros.
About Euphresco
Euphresco is a network of organisations funding research projects and coordinating national research in the phytosanitary area. The overall goal of Euphresco is to support coordination and collaboration in the area of phytosanitary research, and to become a strong, long-term network of funders that fully incorporate existing and new members. (Website: www.euphresco.com)