Let's hear it for large, international collaborations! Hot on the heels of the ENCODE Project (well, in research time anyway) comes the National Institutes of Health's Roadmap Epigenomics Project, which is geared toward understanding how chemical tags on DNA and its associated proteins determine how each cell uses the information in the genome to develop its own identity. One of the leaders of the massive project was geneticist Anshul Kundaje, PhD, who helped to analyze the huge amounts of data generated by labs around the world as they studied more than 100 adult and fetal human tissues.
The work is published today in Nature in the form of a large package of papers. Kundaje is the first author of the main paper; Nature has also published a nice summary of all the papers in the issue and produced a musical video to explain the project.
From our release:
The problem [of picking and choosing from a genome's worth of information] is somewhat like being handed a list of all the ingredients available in a well-stocked kitchen without any idea of how to combine them. Tossing a few of them together, willy-nilly, into a baking dish and popping it into the oven isn’t likely to yield anything edible. But with a well-written recipe telling you how much and when to mix together flour, sugar, eggs and butter, you can turn out a perfect cake or fantastic waffles.
The completion of the Human Genome Project gave biologists the list of ingredients to which every cell has access. The Roadmap Epigenomics Project outlines the recipes and shows how cells use these ingredients to generate their own special sauce. By comparing and contrasting these cellular recipes, researchers can begin to draw parallels among cell types and even predict which cells might be involved in specific traits and diseases.
As a proof of principle, Kundaje and others showed in one of the companion papers that, based on the epigenomic maps shared among cells, the immune system is likely to play a larger role in the development of Alzheimer's disease than previously thought.
Previously: Scientists announce the completion of the ENCODE project, a massive genome encyclopedia , Red light, green light: Simultaneous stop and go signals on stem cells' genes may enable fast activation, provide "aging clock" and Caught in the act! Fast, cheap, high-resolution, easy way to tell which genes a cell is using
