NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – A European Research Council grant will provide between €2 million and €3 million ($2.8 and $4.3 million) to fund multidisciplinary computational biology research at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona).
The five-year award will support the SimDNA project, which aims to provide information about the structure and physical properties of nucleic acids and about how those structures are involved in their functions. The SimDNA project will be led by principal investigator Modesto Orozco, a senior professor and head of IRB Barcelona's Molecular Modeling and Bioinformatics group and director of life sciences at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
The research specifically will seek to provide the scientific community with a series of computational tools that could be applied most directly in gene expression regulation and epigenetics. The researchers aim to develop theoretical models and algorithms for computational simulations at several scales of resolution, to implement computational programs, and to validate their predictions through experiments.
The ERC Advanced Grants program that funded the study is awarded to research efforts that have strong multidisciplinary and innovation applications in emerging fields.