NHGRI Awards NimbleGen $2.5M for ENCODE Project

NEW YORK, Oct. 9 (GenomeWeb News) - NimbleGen Systems has secured two National Human Genome Research Institute grants worth $2.5 million, the company said today. Both grants are part of NHGRI's Encyclopaedia of DNA Elements project, also called ENCODE.

The first grant, for $1.3 million, is called "Discovery of Binding Sites for Transcription Factors" and will have NimbleGen working with the laboratory of Peggy Farnham at the Universityof Wisconsinon this grant. The second grant, for $1.2 million, is called "DNA Array-based Exon Detection and Linkage Mapping" and will have the company working with Michael Pirrung at DukeUniversity.  Both grants are payable over a three year period.

"The NGS system is uniquely suited to accomplish the goals of the ENCODE project," Roland Green, CTO of NimbleGen, said in a statement. "The ability to create custom high-density arrays allows us to rapidly prototype and optimize array designs" in order to identify "all transcription factor binding sites in the human genome."