We won!

(Photo by Jeremy Yoder)

We’re delighted to announced that we’ve just gotten word that we won the Experiment.com challenge for projects at liberal arts colleges — of all the projects in the competition, ours received the support of the most individual backers. The prize is $2,000 in bonus funding, which we can put towards more of the expenses of sequencing and analysis that go into assembling a reference genome sequence.

We literally could not have done this without the support of over 300 backers, and all the folks who’ve taken an interest in this project and spread the word on social media and by good old word-of-mouth. Many, many thanks. The collaborators are all excited to get underway.