NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Jackson Laboratory said this week that its Gene Expression Database (GXD), an open resource for the biomedical research community, will receive $10.5 million over the next five years from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development.
Martin Ringwald, an associate professor at Jackson Laboratory, is the principal investigator on the grant. The new funding extends a previous five-year multi-million grant that was awarded to the GXD by NICHD in 2010 and ended last week.
GXD is a component of the laboratory's overall mouse genome informatics program, which is the international database resource for the laboratory mouse, providing integrated genetic, genomic, and biological data to facilitate the study of human health and disease.
The new funding will support the continued development of the GXD, including further data curation and integration, an expanded database infrastructure, and enhanced data displays and query tools.
"We capture and integrate mouse expression data generated by researchers worldwide, with particular emphasis on mouse development, and make these data freely and widely available, readily accessible to powerful database searches," Ringwald said in a statement. "Gene expression data provides researchers with critical insights in the function of genes and the molecular mechanisms of development, differentiation, and disease. This is vital information for scientists who are investigating normal human development, birth defects and other developmental disorders, cancer, and many other diseases."