Berkeley Lab Genomics Division head and Joint Genome Institute
Director Eddy Rubin and a team of collaborators have secured
a four-year, $11.6 million National Institutes of Health (NIH)
grant renewal to accelerate the development of and facilitate
access to comparative genomics tools for heart, lung and blood
research. These methods specifically focus on deciphering
biomedically relevant features in the human genome.
“Eddy Rubin’s Comparative Genomic Resources program
represents the crème de la crème of
the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute-supported genomic
programs,” said Stephen Young, senior investigator,
Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease and professor
of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
“Eddy’s program had the perspicacity to visualize
the enormous relevance of comparative sequence data, and then
had the vision and drive and creativity to develop the tools
that make it possible for any laboratory to mine comparative
sequence data. Along the way, they have uncovered a treasure
trove of important biological discoveries, including never-recognized
gene regulatory regions and entirely new genes involved in
lipid and lipoprotein metabolism.”
Among the many major accomplishments of the prior funding
cycle was the development of VISTA (Visualization Tools for
Alignments), an extremely popular suite of comparative genomic
tools that has garnered accolades throughout the genomics
community for its ability to quickly compare genomes of various
organisms. VISTA was also among the winners of the 2003 Federal
Laboratory Consortium Awards for Excellence in Technology
Transfer.
In the next funding cycle, the group, consisting of collaborators
from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCSF, Children’s Hospital
Oakland Research Institute, Stanford and others, will continue
to develop new user-friendly comparative genomic tools, as
well as continue to multi-faceted education and outreach program
for the cardiovascular disease research community. Other key
elements of the program include projects to assess gene regulatory
elements identified by cross-species sequence comparisons
and clinical resequencing to examine large sets of candidate
genes suspected to cause heart, lung and blood disorders.
Berkeley Lab leads all DOE national laboratories in NIH funding
with over some $44 million in fiscal year 2003 and ranks in
the top 3 percent of all NIH-funded organizations.
