The Burrill Report

The National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, is awarding $10.5 million in ten grants to help researchers identify millions of genomic elements that play a role in determining what genes are expressed and at what levels in different cells.

The multi-year grants are part of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements project, or ENCODE, set up to provide scientists with a comprehensive catalog of functional genomic elements. The project's goal is to help explain the role that the genome plays in health and disease.

"The ENCODE project is providing a Rosetta Stone to understand how the sequence of the human genome forms the words that tell our bodies how to work at the molecular level," says NHGRI director Eric Green. "By developing more revolutionary technologies for probing genome function, we expect to accelerate these efforts."

Sequencing the human genome and identifying the small fraction of its bases that directly code for proteins were among the first steps in understanding how the genome functions. But the remaining larger fraction of functional genomic elements continues to be a mystery.

To help resolve that mystery, the NHGRI is funding projects focused on creating a new assay to identify RNA splicing elements, new assays to identify promoters and enhancers, as well as a project to improve assays for identifying functional elements by allowing these assays to work reliably using smaller samples.

Validation of biological elements will be addressed by funding projects for new methods with improved throughput, and a smaller project to improve accuracy by testing elements in their natural genomic context.

Computational analysis will be addressed by funding projects to predict regulatory protein binding and gene expression based on sequence alone, and to predict chromosomal interactions and link functional elements to their target genes.

At $1.9 million, the largest of the grants was awarded to a team led by Jay Shendure of the University of Washington, Seattle. Shendure will use the three-year grant to develop methods to capture or synthesize tens of thousands of regulatory elements, and test them in cell lines and mice. Investigators working with Christina Leslie at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City will receive $1.6 million over three years to develop new computational approaches to understand cell-specific gene expression programs. And a University of Michigan team led by Mats Ljungman will receive $1.2 million over three years to support their efforts to develop tests to identity promoters and enhancers and to measure mRNA degradation and splicing kinetics.

The remaining grants are being awarded to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California, Davis, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.


April 27, 2012
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-nih_grants_10_5_million_for_genome_explorations.html