October 24, 2003
Stamatoyannopoulos leads UW group seeking functional DNA elements
Dr. George Stamatoyannopoulos, professor of genome sciences and medicine at the UW, has received a $2.3 million grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) for his involvement in the new effort to identify all functional elements in human DNA. The group he leads will receive a total of $6.9 million over three years. Stamatoyannopoulos, who is also an adjunct professor of pathology, and his colleagues will study the large-scale application of existing technologies for determining functional elements.
The effort is called the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project. The mission is to build a comprehensive “parts list” of the human genome by identifying and precisely locating all functional elements in the human DNA sequence. The project is projected to cost $36 million over three years. Teams of scientists from all over the world in government, industry, and academia will work to gather data.
The data generated from the ENCODE project will be collected and stored in a database that will be rapidly and freely available to the entire scientific community.
