Projects
Genomics of AML
The long-term goal of the "Genomics of AML" program project is to define all the DNA changes that occur in adult Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML) cells, and to define the importance of these mutations for disease susceptibility, initiation, progression, relapse, and resistance. The short-term goal is to define the most frequently occurring mutations that affect outcomes from treatment, since these are the ones most likely to have an impact on therapy. We will use this information to create better molecular diagnostic tools and to identify candidate genes for targeted therapeutics. The identification of the mutations that occur in adult AML genomes will contribute greatly to our understanding of the development of this disease.
Human Gut Microbiome Initiative
Maize Project
The Genome Center at Washington University School of Medicine is the lead institution for project. Utilizing a minimal tiling path of large insert clones that span nearly the entire maize genome, we are generating a sequence-based scaffold with all gene islands and other non-repetitive regions finished to a high quality standard. The resulting sequence will be anchored to the physical and genetic maps of strain B73, and annotated with respect to gene content and other biologically relevant features.
Non-Human Primates
The benefits of non-human primate whole genome sequencing are immense. One primary goal of the non-human primate genome initiative is to document the genetic differences that have emerged over the last 70 million years of evolution. More importantly several species of non-human primates are our only models for mimicking human disease, and as such, the availability of draft sequence assemblies for these species is critical for biomedical research.
The Cancer Genome Atlas
The Cancer Genome Atlas- The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) represents an ambitious effort to catalog the molecular changes underlying tumor etiology. Washington University Genome Center has been an active participant of TCGA studies and already made substantial contributions to the TCGA pilot study by discovering several key genes/mutations and their functional impacts in human glioblastoma. We have built a high-throughput, automated pipeline that is flexible enough to accommodate various kinds of analyses required for studying diverse types of TCGA data. This pipeline includes state-of-the-art technologies and software tools, many of which we have successfully deployed for analyzing Tumor Sequencing Project (TSP) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML) data. We will augment these existing tools with new algorithms for integration and analysis of TCGA data from diverse sequencing and array platforms. These efforts will lead to accurate identification of significant molecular changes in cancer and reveal their intrinsic interactions, as well as their associations with different clinical features and subtypes. These data will contribute to the formulation of a reference platform for the identification of prominent drug candidates as well as diagnostic and prognostic markers.
