CLC Bio said this week that it will provide bioinformatics capabilities for a €12 million ($15 million) five-year project funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Program that will study mechanisms involved in stem cell differentiation.
Scientists involved in the 4DcellFate project will look at how the polycomb repressive complex and the nucleosome remodeling and histone deacetylase complexes regulate cell fate. The effort will rely on a mix of structural biology, microscopy, proteomics, high-throughput sequencing, and computational modeling techniques.
CLC Bio will be involved in building bioinformatics frameworks for handling, visualizing, and integrating the project data as well as in creating computational models of diseases.
The project researchers believe that a better understanding of how these complexes work could lead to the development of models for diseases such as cancer. In addition, the project could lead to the development of molecules that better control stem cell differentiation ex vivo so that these cells could by used to study disease progression in culture as well as to screen and develop drugs.
Other organizations involved in the project include the University of Cambridge; the Spanish Centre for Genomic Regulation; Copenhagen University; the University Medical Centre Utrecht; University of Antwerp; the European Molecular Biology Laboratory; the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science; the European Institute of Oncology; Horizon Discovery; Cellartis; and GlaxoSmithKline.
A kickoff meeting will be held Feb. 14 at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain.