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The National Human Genome Research Institute has awarded USC $18.7 million to establish a center that will develop faster ways to identify genes that cause disease. |
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The USC Center of Excellence in Genomic Science will unite scientists from the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences with colleagues at the Keck School of Medicine of USC in an international
effort to catalog human genetic variations. |
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“We will focus on developing and testing new experimental and computational techniques that will increase our ability to find disease-related genes and extract other useful knowledge from the human genome,” said computational biologist Michael Waterman, the principal investigator. The co-director is geneticist Norman Arnheim. |
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The National Human Genome Research Institute, one of the National Institutes of Health, will spread the $18.7 million over five years. USC, one of only seven universities to receive such a grant,
will have the only center of its kind in Southern California. |
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Research at the new center will tie into a study called the International HapMap Project – also funded in part by the NIH – that is working to find DNA landmarks that will provide shortcuts to identifying disease-causing genes. |
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The human genome, often referred to as the “Book of Life,” comprises roughly 3 billion pairs of DNA – genetic material made up of chemicals, or “nucleotides,” identified by the letters A, T, C and G. |
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While most people share identical DNA sequences, much of human variation stems from genetic differences in as little as one DNA letter. Some of these “spelling” changes – called a single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP – are thought to cause or contribute to disease. |
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While researchers have discovered millions of SNPs in the genome, figuring out a way to identify the variations important in common diseases has been challenging. |
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As part of the international project, researchers from five nations are investigating these patterns of genetic variation by collecting samples from about 300 people (including Han Chinese, Yorubas in Nigeria, Japanese and U.S. residents of northern and western European descent). |
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They hope to identify the SNPs that can be used to quickly tag entire blocks. In the end, they want to characterize just 500,000 SNP tags out of the 10 million estimated to be in the genome. |
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The USC group will analyze data collected in the HapMap Project and conduct original research.
“This NIH grant ratifies USC’s decision to begin supporting in the 1980s what was then an obscure field — computational biology,” said Joseph Aoun, dean of USC College and holder of the Anna H. Bing Dean’s Chair.
“We were among the first to focus on this field, and Mike Waterman’s pioneering work here at USC laid the foundation for one of modern science’s most significant achievements — the sequencing of the human genome,“ Aoun said. |
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“Now this USC research provides a blueprint for attacking complex, pernicious diseases while advancing the development of a new kind of personalized medicine.”
A $3 million portion of the grant will go toward a training program in the College designed to recruit and support minority undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows pursuing careers in genomics, bioinformatics and computational biology. |
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Other USC projects will include:
- developing a way to determine which SNPs should be used as tags;
- investigating the quality of human genetic variation data;
- improving the reliability of techniques used to find SNPs; and
- studying the biological processes that created the block structure.
As part of the center’s research, the team will test and refine any new computational methods they develop using real cancer genetics data collected by team members from the epidemiology group in the medical school.
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