NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The David H. Murdock Research Institute (DHMRI) in Kannapolis, NC, said today that it has received a $50 million donation from its namesake donor, and it will use the funds to support its day-to-day operations over the next eight years.
David H. Murdock, chairman of Dole Food Company, has now provided over $131 million to the institute since 2007 and has donated a total of $600 million to fund the North Carolina Research Campus (NCRC), where the DHMRI resides.
Situated in the 311,000 square-foot Murdock Core Laboratory Building, DHMRI serves as the core lab for the NCRC, and provides research services for genomics, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, and in vitro and in vivo services to academic, business, and government collaborators.
The NCRC houses 16 corporate, academic, and healthcare partners involved in R&D for medical, agricultural, and nutrition applications.
The institute also has supported the Measurement to Understand the Reclassification of Disease of Cabarrus/Kannapolis Study, which is a longitudinal project led by Duke University and funded with $35 million from Murdock that seeks to use genomics technologies to develop personalized treatments. The project has recruited more than 9,000 participants from Cabarrus County and Kannapolis.
DHMRI's genomics capabilities include de novo genome sequencing and resequencing to study genomic variation, SNP discovery and similar projects; target resequencing using Illumina's TruSeq and exome capture or Agilent's SureSelect capture technology; ChIP-seq studies for detecting transcription factor binding sites; epigenomics studies using methylation profiling; microarray-based studies using genotype analysis and expression analysis; and research using the Sequenom MassArray system for SNP genotyping, DNA methylation analysis, and somatic mutation profiling.