Broad scientists awarded ENCODE grant

Full-scale project will survey human genome’s functional landscape

Researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital have been awarded one of seven grants from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) to support the second phase of the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project. The effort is led by a public research consortium and aims to identify all functional elements in the human genome, including both the regions that code for proteins and those that do not.

The initial results from the project’s pilot phase, published in June in landmark papers in Nature and Genome Research, revealed that the organization, function, and evolution of the human genome are far more complicated than most had suspected. The findings stemmed from analyses of just 1% of the entire genome sequence. From that limited survey, the need for a more comprehensive view of the genome’s complexity became clear.

“Based on ENCODE’s early success, we are moving forward with a full-scale initiative to build a parts list of biologically functional elements in the human genome,” said NHGRI Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.

Bradley Bernstein, an associate member of the Broad Institute and assistant professor of pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital, is among the principal investigators chosen to receive an ENCODE scale-up grant. Working with institute director Eric Lander and Broad researchers Manolis Kellis, Chad Nusbaum, David Jaffe, and Tarjei Mikkelsen, Bernstein will use high-throughput sequencing methods to create genome-wide maps of chromatin in various types of human cells. Chromatin proteins help control how tightly the double helix is packed and thus regulate gene activity. A recent study in Nature by Bernstein and his colleagues revealed that these maps contain a wealth of biological information, including new information that may help researchers localize the so-called “non-coding” portions of the genome.

Adapted from a National Human Genome Research Institute press release.