NIH funding for Molecular Anatomy database development.
An international team, including Jamie Davies' lab in CIP, Richard Baldock's lab in the MRC Human Genetics Unit, Edinburgh and two collaborators in Australia and the USA, has received 5-year programme funding from the National Institutes of Health, USA, to develop their GUDMAP database.
The database was originally created as part of an NIH programme that is just coming to an end. This programme, the Genito-Urinary Development Molecular Anatomy Project (GUDMAP), mapped at high resolution the changing expression patterns of over 8000 genes during the development of the mouse excretory and reproductive systems.
The data assembled have already given valuable insights into mechanisms of normal development and disease.
The next phase of work, beginning in 2011, will include maintaining data flow into the database while improving the ease with which it can be used, increasing the ways with which it can integrate with other databases of genetics and disease, and allowing it to be used as an archive for raw data across the field of urogenital research.
Large-scale electronic resources such as this one are a critical part of shaping biology in the modern era, when the sequence of the human genome is known but we still have much to learn about what all of the genes actually do.
The ability to track their behaviour en masse, rather than one by one, allows researchers to see significant patterns and provides an excellent 'normal' comparison for studies of a vast range of childhood and adult diseases.
This article was published on Jul 22, 2011