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Corn Growers Welcome Senate
Appropriations Committee Bioinformatics Provisions; New Corn Hybrids
Possible with Project (8-6-01)
Corn growers are
welcoming action by the Senate Appropriations Committee, last week,
that approved provisions focused on increasing funding for bioinformatics.
The two FY 2002 appropriations bills -- S. 1216, the VA, HUD & Independent
Agencies appropriations bill will provide funding for the National Science
Foundation (NSF) and S. 1191, the agricultural appropriations bill.
Vic Miller, Oelwein,
Iowa, farmer and chairman of the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA)
Customer & Business Development Action Team stated, "Bioinformatics
is essential to our ability to utilize basic genome data to create new
hybrids that will solve problems facing the Nation's corn growers."
Over the past three
years, the NSF plant genome program has generated massive amounts of
data on corn and other crops. Bioinformatics is essential to identifying
genes associated with important plant processes such as disease resistance,
noted Miller.
Bioinformatics is
the application of computer and statistical techniques to the management
of information and, for genome projects, includes the development of
methods to search databases quickly, to analyze DNA sequence information,
and to predict protein sequence and structure from DNA sequence data.
The Senate panel
included $750,000 for a bioinformatics institute for model plant species
and an increase of $4.5 million for bioinformatics & genomics at
the Agricultural Research Service. In addition to the funding provided
in the agricultural appropriations bill, the VA, HUD appropriations
bill increased funding for the NSF Information Technology program.
In providing the
increase, the Senate Appropriations Committee urged the NSF to use its
funding to support the needs of other disciplines, such as the plant
genome research community. The Committee noted that the plant genome
research community has significant needs in bioinformatics and the Committee
urged the NSF to allocate a portion of the information technology funding
for bioinformatics.
Last
reviewed August 6, 2001
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