The new effort, funded with $36 million, is called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project and will be carried out by an international consortium made up of 14 scientists in government, industry and academia. A consortium will be utilized due to the wide range of technologies to be tested and developed.
The UCSD recipients are:
Bing Ren, Ph.D., a member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at UCSD and a UCSD assistant professor of cellular and molecular medicine, who will receive $3.1 million for a project titled "Mapping Transcriptional Regulatory Elements in Human DNA." Working with him on the project are Christopher Glass, M.D., Ph.D., UCSD professor of cellular and molecular medicine, and Michael G. Rosenfeld, M.D., UCSD professor of medicine and a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Xiang-Dong Fu, Ph.D., UCSD associate professor of cellular and molecular medicine, who will receive $1.4 million for "A Novel chIP-Chip Technology for ENCODE."
The grants were announced by NHGRI director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., who led the public effort to sequence all 3 billion base pairs of human DNA. He noted that "the Human Genome Project has provided us with a wonderful foundation, but obviously having the human genomic sequence is not enough. We must keep on exploring this newfound wealth of knowledge if we are to realize the full potential of genome research to improve human health."
Ren explained that his research will test the efficiency of a genome-wide location an
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Contact: Sue Pondrom
spondrom@ucsd.edu
619-543-6163
University of California - San Diego
21-Oct-2003