The Jackson Laboratory

Jackson Laboratory Awarded $15.1M Federal Grant

JAX^® NOTES Issue 502, Summer 2006

Under a "National Centers for Systems Biology" program, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) has awarded a five-year grant for $15,073,585 to a team of Jackson Laboratory researchers and collaborators who are using a new systems approach to study the genetics of health and disease. Members of the team from The Jackson Laboratory are Executive Research Fellow and Senior Staff Scientist Ken Paigen, Ph.D., Senior Staff Scientist Gary Churchill, Ph.D., Associate Staff Scientist Joel Graber, Ph.D., and Associate Research Scientist Petko Petkov, Ph.D. Collaborating researchers are from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, NC and Perlegen Sciences, Inc., Mountain View, CA.

The new team's mission is to understand how clusters of the 30,000 or so human genes interact to cause disease. Using innovative computational approaches, the team has already made important progress in understanding how genes in the mouse genome are organized. As Dr. Churchill, the grant's principal investigator, says, "It turns out that most of those genes, individually, are perfectly benign, It's only in certain combinations that these diseases arise." The team will try to determine what those combinations are and under what environmental circumstances they must exist.

The new team joins seven other institutions who have received NIGMS-funds for systems biology research: Harvard University, Princeton University, Case Western Reserve University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Washington, and the Institute for Systems Biology. More information on the National Centers for Systems Biology program web site.