Snyder, Cherry receive grants to advance work on ENCODE project

Michael Cherry

Two medical school investigators have received grants from the National Human Genome Research Institute as part of a massive collaborative effort to catalogue the functional elements of the human genome.

The $30.3 million grant will be distributed among 15 investigators participating in the National Institute of Health's ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project. Michael Snyder, PhD, director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine, and Michael Cherry, PhD, associate professor of genetics, are among the recipients.

Scientists have known for some time that a vast majority of the genome does not encode proteins, but instead consists of functional elements that provide control for when and where our genes function. Although each of the trillions of cells in our bodies contains the same DNA, differential gene expression dictated by functional elements allows each cell type to make the unique proteins necessary for its specific function. Identifying the regulatory elements will allow researchers to better understand the role of the genome in health and disease, and specifically may shed light on mutations that fall into these regulatory regions.

Michael Snyder

Snyder's team will receive $12.7 million over the next four years to continue mapping regulatory regions of the genome. In collaboration with a team led by fellow recipient Richard Myers, PhD, at HudsonAlpha Institute in Huntsville, Ala., Snyder plans to continue his ENCODE research by mapping out more than 1,500 transcription factor binding sites, which dictate the expression of associated genes. He likens the cataloguing of functional elements in the genome to mapping the country's back roads: "We know where some of the major highways are, but now we're aiming for the whole map."

Cherry's group will receive $11.5 million over four years to fuel the ENCODE Data Coordination Center in collaboration with a team from UC-Santa Cruz. The Coordination Center will collect, organize and store the massive amount of data produced by all of the ENCODE teams. Because of both the grand scale of the data and the variety of methods used to acquire it, this organizational effort will require ongoing innovation and is central to the success of the program.