NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Medical University of South Carolina has received a $292,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to support a proteogenomics and bioinformatics core for cardiovascular disease research.
The grant, administered by the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences, will help create the new core as part of the existing South Carolina Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) for cardiovascular disease.
The mission of the new core is to provide investigators from MUSC and across the region with "expert consultation, training, state-of-the-art instrumentation, and turnkey services to address questions of gene expression and protein function," according to the grant's abstract.
"To advance our understanding of how gene expression relates to embryonic development and adult disease, the core has excelled in microarray screening technology," the abstract states. "To support this activity, the core has built a record of accomplishment in data management and analysis and custom development of bioinformatics tools."
The new core will also provide support for related gene expression methodologies including RNA preparation and quality assessment, real-time qPCR analysis, chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP), and ChlP-on-Chip to analyze genomic DNA sequences bound to specific proteins and epigenetic modifications.
MUSC said that the new core also provides a variety of protein-related services including surface plasmon resonance analysis of protein interactions, multiplex bead array-based analysis of phosphoprotein and cytokine levels, and consultation for expression and purification of proteins.