NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) - The US Army has awarded a grant to Gene Network Sciences and Cornell University to build computational models of a bacterium that is used to dechlorinate toxic pollutants, the company said yesterday.
The company did not disclose the amount of funding it received under the grant.
The study is titled "Systems Biology of Dehalococcoides: Using Network Inference Modeling to Integrate Omics Datasets Under Varied Conditions."
The researchers from Cornell include Ruth Richardson, Stephen Zinder, and James Gosset, and the lead GNS researcher is Bruce Church.
Richardson said in a statement that anaerobic microbes have shown promise for remediating sites polluted with chlorinated organics, but “the manner in which these organisms work is still not well understood.”
The researchers will study Dehalococcoides in varying conditions using gene expression, proteomics, and other molecular-level data in order to gain a better understanding of the bacterium’s ability to dechlorinate toxic pollutants.
GNS said it will use its “reverse engineering and forward simulation” software platform to guide the experimental design and to discover biomolecular “gears in the machine” that drive the organism’s function.