Public Funding for Genestack Limited

As population growth and climate change have become major challenges to food security, traditional routes to crop improvement are too slow to keep up with demand. This feasibility project involves building a proof-of- concept integration of Rothamsted's network analysis toolset into Genestack extensible genomics data analysis platform. Genestack is a bioinformatics startup created by experts from the European Bioinformatics Institute. Rothamsted Research is a leading UK institute, where the availability of plant genomes, transcriptomes and other data types has led to new insights: genetic improvement of grain development and quality, yield, disease resistance, drought tolerance and nutrient response. Complex analytical approaches of diverse ‘omics data types are required to make such advances. The project aims to broaden Genestack's agri-informatics capabilities with diverse multi-omics plant datasets (genomes, transcriptomes, quantitative trait loci and literature) to enable the analysis of biological networks, to enable the provision of a robust integrated multi- omics data management, pre-processing and interpretation service to companies in the agri-tech industry.