Millennium Seed Bank Chooses GeneDirectory To Help Save Rare Plant Species

17th January 2003 Cambridge, UK: Cambridge, UK: Syngene, a world-leading manufacturer of image analysis solutions, is delighted to announce its GeneDirectory gel data storage and analysis software has been installed by the prestigious Millennium Seed Bank at Kew’s Royal Botanic Gardens. The software will be used as a tool, to assist rapid and precise identification of which seeds to preserve from some of the world’s rarest plant species.

GeneDirectory has three ways of automatically comparing bands on different gels, ranging from simple band comparison to more complex co-dominance and dominance analysis. Researchers at the Millennium Seed Bank intend to use GeneDirectory to reduce the repetitive manual comparison of thousands of different plant cDNA band patterns. Many different patterns are produced by placing seeds under stress conditions such as temperature extremes. The results can be exported directly to Excel spreadsheets, Word or as text files. Millennium Seed Bank researchers believe the information gathered will eventually lead to the development of a general set of rules, concerning the successful selection of seeds for long term storage.

Dr Peter Toorop, Senior Scientific Officer at the Millennium Seed Bank explained: “Maintaining a bank of viable seeds is important to mankind because some plant species may soon be extinct. With the Millennium Seed Bank we do not only save species, but also potentially valuable properties such as untapped medicinal components.” Dr Toorop added: “We chose GeneDirectory to help with this vital research because it looked simple to operate. Since we already use a Syngene GeneGnome system for our chemiluminescent image capture and analysis, we were certain Syngene could provide the right software for cDNA analysis work too.”

Paul Ellwood, Syngene’s Divisional Sales and Marketing Director commented: “Having GeneDirectory selected for such a high profile project is a great coup for Syngene. We know GeneDirectory can rise to the challenges of the Millennium Seed Bank Project and will reward its researchers with highly accurate results, on which they can confidently base those all important conservation decisions.”

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Dr Peter Toorop, Millennium Seed Bank, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Wakehurst Place, Ardingly, West Sussex, RH17 6TN, UK.

Note to Editors

About Syngene

Syngene is a world-leading supplier of integrated imaging solutions for analysis and documentation of gel-based information. Syngene’s systems are used by more than 10,000 research organisations and over 50,000 individual scientists world-wide and include many of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies and major research institutes.

Syngene, founded in 1997, is a division of the Synoptics Group based in Cambridge, UK. The Group’s other divisions, Synbiosis and Syncroscopy, specialise in digital imaging solutions for microbial and microscopy applications respectively. Synoptics currently employs 50 people in its UK and subsidiary operation in Frederick, USA. The Group has profitable revenue of almost $10 million and continues to grow rapidly.

About the Millennium Seed Bank

The Millennium Seed Bank Project is an international collaborative plant conservation initiative. This world-wide effort aims to safeguard 24,000 plant species from around the globe against extinction and has already successfully secured the future of virtually all the UK's native flowering plants.

The Millennium Seed Bank Project is staffed by the Seed Conservation Department of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and is supported by the Millennium Commission, The Wellcome Trust and Orange plc.