Charles Morgan offers $20,000 bounty for first WA genome paper

Following on from the almost $1 million donation towards installing next generation genome sequencing equipment in Western Australia, philanthropist and mining entrepreneur Charles Morgan has offered a $20,000 prize for the first research paper to be published using the equipment.

Mr Morgan's donated nearly $1 million which, along with $225,000 from the University of Western Australia, bought a SOLiD4 and SOLiD 5500XL next generation sequencer, as well as an Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer, SPRIworks TE Fragment Library system II and OpenArray Realtime PCR system for sample preparation.

The equipment was installed at the Lotterywest State Biomedical Facility: Genomics (LSBFG) at Royal Perth Hospital and went live earlier this month.

The $20,000 prize will go to the Western Australian researcher or researchers whose use of the equipment leads to a paper published in Nature, Science, Nature Genetics, Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, or Cell.

"I have offered this prize to encourage researchers to think beyond their current research and consider how they might be able to use the equipment," Mr Morgan said.

"I am hopeful that this incentive will spur on some of our great creative scientific thinkers."