The CIGENE node of the Norwegian Sequencing and Genotyping Service Platform

CIGENE's mandate in the FUGE I period has been to: A. Establish and maintain a national core facility providing: (i) - a high-throughput SNP-typing service for human, animal, plant and microbial materials, (ii) - key competence concerning identification a nd methodological integration of experimental and theoretical approaches for making a causal connection between genomic and phenotypic data on complex traits in fish, mammals, plants and micro-organisms. B. Use this core facility within bovine and marine functional genomics to promote a deep mechanistic understanding of commercially important traits. We intend to continue as a national core facility in the FUGE II period, with particular emphasis on the production, population and evolutionary biology seg ments. We assume that other sites in the Norwegian Sequencing and Genotyping Service Platform will be given main responsibility for large scale genotyping on human material, but we will still provide a small to medium scale genotyping service for all spec ies (including human material) based on our current Sequenom MassARRAY technology. The Norwegian University of Life Sciences is ready to take full financial responsibility for maintaining CIGENE as a service core facility after 2011. The university has a lready invested a substantial amount of money in establishing and running CIGENE the last 4 years, and is dedicated to supporting the centre with an equivalent annual amount also in the period 2007-2011. We plan to meet the expectations from FUGE concerni ng funding responsibilities after 2011 by establishing a not-for-profit company that will handle a major part of the service obligations and which will be fully operational by the end of 2011. We will thereby meet the FUGE requirements as well as contribu te to a very critical parameter concerning continued funding of the FUGE concept, namely the creation of new companies and business opportunities.