The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health today announced an $8 million, three-year grant to establish a Wisconsin Center of Excellence in Genomics Science. The new Center is a collaborative effort between the University of Wisconsin in Madison, The Medical College of Wisconsin, and Marquette University, and will be coordinated by the Medical College of Wisconsin. It will be co-directed by Michael Olivier, Ph.D., professor of physiology at the MCW Biotechnology and Bioengineering Center (BBC) and the Human and Molecular Genetics Center (HMGC); and Lloyd M. Smith, Ph.D., W.L. Hubbell professor of chemistry and Director of the Genome Center of Wisconsin (GCW) at UW-Madison.
The Centers of Excellence in Genomics Science program, initiated by NHGRI in 2001, assembles interdisciplinary research teams to develop novel technologies that significantly advance genomic research. The Wisconsin Center and another newly funded Center of Excellence at the University of North Carolina join an elite group of existing Centers of Excellence at Arizona State University, the California Institute of Technology, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and Yale University.
"Our aim is to foster the formation of innovative research teams that will develop genomic tools and technologies that help to advance human health," said Alan E. Guttmacher, M.D., NHGRI's acting director. "Each of these centers is in a position to tackle some of the most challenging questions facing biology today."
The team at the Wisconsin Center will focus on developing novel technologies for the comprehensive analysis of proteins that bind to DNA. According to Dr. Olivier, "We have a complete blueprint of the human DNA sequence thanks to the Human Genome Project, but we still do not really understand how the information encoded in the genome is read and used by the millions of cells in our body. Recent development of novel technologies allows us to study how individual proteins bind and interact with the DNA across the entire genome, and how this interaction varies in different cell types and under different conditions. Unfortunately, this approach only works with proteins that are already known. What is needed, and what we will develop in this Center, is technology that is able to identify all of the proteins that are interacting with the genome, even if we do not know in advance what their function may be."
According to Dr. Smith, "We want to know what sets of genes are turned on and off, and how this is coordinated and controlled. We have DNA sequences for so many organisms, but the big question now is figuring out what they are doing. We have the blueprints, but we don't know how to read them, and gene regulation is front and center to that problem. Can we find the rules for when genes are turned on and off?"