Epigenetics Receives Green Light as Major Initiative in NIH Roadmap 1.5
Jun 22, 2007 news links
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has concluded their selection process for a new cohort of Roadmap initiatives, approving four topics as Major Roadmap Initiatives. Two programs, epigenetics and microbiomes, were approved for immediate implementation as five year programs. The four programs approved as major roadmap initiatives are:
Microbiome – The goal of the proposed Human Microbiome Project is to characterize the microbial content of sites in the human body and examine whether changes in the microbiome can be related to disease.
Epigenetics – Epigenetics is the study of stable genetic modifications that result in changes in gene expression and function without a corresponding alteration in DNA sequence. The epigenome is a catalog of the epigenetic modifications that occur in the genome. Epigenetic changes have been associated with disease, but further progress requires the development of better methods to detect the modifications and a clearer understanding of factors that drive these changes.
Protein Capture Tools/ Proteome Tools – The Proteome is the complete set of proteins in the body. Efforts in this area would support developing and making available to the scientific community high quality probes specific to every protein in the human and in desired animal models. This would allow the ability to characterize protein function in health and disease and to monitor the markers of a disease in order to deploy early prevention efforts and to identify potential therapeutic targets.
Phenotyping Services and Tools – A human Phenotype is the total physical appearance and constitution of a person, often determined by multiple genes and influenced by environmental interactions. Initiatives in this area would encourage the development of resources to systematically catalog human phenotypes in an effort to characterize complex diseases and disorders. Link
Science reports that NIH will be sending out solicitations for the epigenetics and microbiome initiatives this fall. Link
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