Agricultural Research Council in South Africa Selects CLC bio’s Enterprise Platform

PRETORIA, South Africa – Today inqaba biotec, reseller of CLC bio’s solutions in South Africa, announced that they have finalized a contract with the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) in South Africa, to install CLC bio’s enterprise platform throughout the ARC, across several geographical locations.

In order to address the ARC’s key strategic areas of improving food security, increasing crop productivity, and management of responses to climate change, the ARC has created a central biotechnology platform which concentrates all their high-throughput sequencing and high-performance computing capabilities for agricultural research in one integrated department.

Head of the Biotechnology Platform at the ARC, Dr. Jasper Rees, states, “We selected CLC bio’s enterprise platform as it provides the ideal client/server environment we need to distribute bioinformatics and genomics tools across our organization in all of South Africa. Coupled with a newly installed Illumina HiScan, our biotechnology platform now has a great capability and flexibility within a very wide range of areas, such as de novo sequencing, re-sequencing, transcriptome sequencing, and viral metagenomics.”

CEO at inqaba biotec, Dr. Oliver Preisig, continues, “We’re experiencing a substantial interest from a broad range of organizations in South Africa, as well as the rest of Africa, to invest in bioinformatics for analysis of next generation sequencing data. And for the ARC to be leading the way with this ambitious setup of international calibre, is extremely positive for the country, increasing the ability to take our research to the next levels using cutting-edge technologies!”

The ARC plans to apply these new technologies to a very wide range of crops and animals, exploring complex systems such as drought tolerance using quantitative gene expressions, map genome sequences for indigenous vegetable crops, and identify and characterize unknown pathogens from animals or plants.

Video

CLC bio’s web tv station features a new interview with Dr. Jasper Rees where he elaborates further on ARC’s research and technological setup:

https://www.clcbio.tv/video/1543903

About inqaba biotec

https://www.inqababiotec.co.za

About ARC

https://www.arc.agric.za

About CLC bio

https://www.clcbio.com/about

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