The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has announced the awarding of a major grant to a Rutgers-led consortium of research scientists for a five-year project working to determine the structures and functions of proteins. The first-year award is $4 million, with total funding over five years reaching some $25 million.
With more information on the human genome becoming available every day courtesy of the Human Genome Project, the public has become optimistic that new cures for diseases will follow immediately. Yet merely knowing gene sequence information does not tell the whole story. For the genetic sequences to have real value, scientists must determine the corresponding information about the proteins encoded by the genes.
The NIGMS award, one of seven awarded nationally, is part of the agency's structural genomics initiative. Structural genomics is the study of structural data and, ultimately, functional information of all known proteins based on the information of protein families.
Gaetano T. Montelione, a professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at Rutgers and a resident faculty member at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine (CABM), is the principal investigator in a consortium of scientists working at the interface between computation, structural biology, biomedical research and information sciences to determine each gene's biochemical function.
"We see this award from the National Institute of General Medical Science as a reflection of Rutgers' status as one of the nation's top research universities," said Rutgers President Francis L. Lawrence. Multi-institutional partnerships such as this one led by CABM will help establish the university as a leader in the rapidly expanding field of bioinformatics."
"Structural genomics is advancing the Human Genome Project to a functional level and opening exciting new opportunities in biotechnology and medicine," said Aaron Shatkin, director of CABM. "This outstanding award will support the efforts of Guy and his colleagues at the forefront of bioinformatics -- a rapidly growing, dynamic and critically important force in life sciences research."
With its five-year commitment to such research, NIGMS has become the world's single largest funder of structural genomics. The institute anticipates spending some $150 million over five years on this research.
"This project can be viewed as an inventory of all the protein structure families that exist in nature. We expect that this effort will yield major biological findings that will improve our understanding of health and disease," said Marvin Cassman, director of NIGMS.
This NIGMS grant was awarded to the Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium (NESGC), made up of scientists from Rutgers, Columbia University, the University of Toronto and Yale University, along with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in Buffalo, University Health Network in Toronto, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, Hebrew University in Israel, Cornell University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, the Genomic Sciences Center of Japan, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
The NESGC was formed to evaluate the feasibility, costs, economies of scale and value of structural genomics. The primary goal of its research is to develop integrated technologies for high-throughput protein production and 3-D structure determination. These will form key components of the scientific infrastructure required for the next stage of genome research beyond DNA sequencing. The NIGMS award will allow the consortium to expand its work in X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy to target proteins from a number of model organisms, including the fruit fly, yeast and the roundworm, along with related human proteins, in order to determine protein structures.
The results of the initiative's funded research at the NESGC and the other six grant recipients are expected to form the foundation of a public resource that will link information on sequence, structure and function of proteins, and be available to scientists worldwide.
"This award is an outgrowth of earlier research funded by a grant from the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology," said Montelione. "That $2.9 million grant, awarded to CABM in 1997, along with a seed grant from the Merck Genome Research Institute, laid the groundwork in the development of a system that has dramatically stepped up the discovery of various gene functions that could lead to the faster development of drug therapies to treat human diseases and disorders."
CABM is jointly sponsored by Rutgers and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and receives support from the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology.