NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will use a $1.6 million Grand Opportunities grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute to conduct genomics and proteomics research, UNC said on Thursday.
The funding, derived from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was awarded to researchers conducting studies as part of NHGRI's ENCyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project.
The principal investigators on the grant, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics Xian Chen and Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and Biomedical Engineering Morgan Giddings, will use the GO grant to generate, analyze, and then release large-scale data sets on proteins in the human genome.
Giddings said in a statement that the research will "significantly promote our understanding of the language of the human genome, enhancing efforts to solve pressing human health issues like heart disease and cancer by understanding how errors in the blueprint lead to disease, and how we might fix those errors."