Texas A&M Deploys DRAGEN

Founded in 2010, the Genomics and Bioinformatics Service has been fulfilling its mission to improve access to the latest genomics technologies across the Texas A&M University System plant and animal research community and beyond. The team has been analyzing thousands of samples, generating millions of sequencing reads and successfully managing peaks in sample submissions resulting from the seasonal nature of agricultural breeding cycles. The samples must be processed quickly so that breeders can make timely decisions on what to advance in their breeding programs.

“We are excited to install the new DRAGEN server and anticipate it will solve many of the analysis issues we have been facing,” said Charles D. Johnson, Ph.D., Director of the Genomics and Bioinformatics Service at Texas A&M AgriLife Research. “As users of Illumina products, we see their levels of innovative technology as unprecedented in comparison with anything else on the market.”

The Illumina DRAGEN Bio-IT Platform provides accurate, ultra-rapid secondary analysis of sequencing data. In its latest release, v3.4, the platform has improved accuracy and speed for RNA gene fusion detection and quantification, and added functionality and accuracy enhancements to small variant caller and structural variant caller.

Initial agricultural customer evaluations of DRAGEN show that mapping against the ash tree genome was 177 times faster per processing core than its local HPC systems, requiring only seven minutes instead of three hours on one of the larger datasets. Alignment runs on the rice genome that take approximately two hours on their HPC servers, but took just three minutes using DRAGEN.

“Our collaboration with Texas A&M AgriLife supports our shared goal to improve access to genomics in the agriculture community,” said Lisa Eldridge, Associate Director, Illumina Agriculture Market Segment. “Adding the DRAGEN server to its workflow will enable faster data turnaround and accelerate researchers’ ability to use this data to move their critical research forward.”

Please click here to learn more about Illumina’s offerings for agriculture and you can visit the DRAGEN webpages to learn more.