NIAID Bioinformatics Resource Centers Award Nine Driving Biological Projects

The NIAID Bioinformatics Resource Centers (BRCs) have made nine two-year awards to establish Driving Biological Projects (DBPs). The DBPs are designed to promote close cooperation between bioinformatics specialists and experimental biologists and to stimulate cooperation on data analysis, visualization and development of new bioinformatics tools.

The projects are aimed at generating experimental evidence for genomic, proteomic, or metabolomic annotation of NIAID-targeted pathogens. Such experimental support fills an unmet need for bioinformatics-derived computational annotations. All data and information generated by the DBPs will be made accessible to the broader scientific community through the BRCs.

The BRCs solicited proposals for the DBPs in an open competition, stressing an interest in research projects that utilize high-throughput experimental technologies and the importance of delivering the research data to the scientific community. All proposals were reviewed by the BRCs’ Scientific Working Groups, independent groups of external advisors to the BRCs. Recommendations for the awards were made to NIAID based on technical feasibility, scientific merit, innovation, and impact on BRC development.

A second DBPs solicitation is expected to be issued by the BRCs in 2012.

Awards

The awards have been distributed among the 4 BRCs. Each listing includes the principal investigator(s), affiliation, and proposal title:

• EuPathDB BRC
  • Brian Gregory (UPenn) & Jonathan Wastling (University of Liverpool): “A Comprehensive Catalog of Toxoplasma gondii and Neospora caninum Parasite and Infected Host Cell Transcriptomes and Proteomes”
  • Manuel Llinas (Princeton) & Michael Ferdig (University of Notre Dame): “Dissection of Plasmodium falciparum genetic crosses by mass-spectrometry-based metabolite QTL”
  • John Boothroyd (Stanford): “High-throughput analysis of oocyst development in Toxoplasma”
• PATRIC BRC
  • Michael McClelland (University of California, Irvine): “Fitness Annotation of Bacterial Genomes”
  • Yung – Fu Chang (Cornell University): “Comparative Transcriptome and Proteome Analysis of Clostridium difficile Strains”
• VectorBase BRC
  • David C. Schwartz (University of Wisconsin-Madison): “Physical Reference Maps for Vector Genome Assembly”
  • Leslie B. Vosshall (Rockefeller University): “Comparative Neurotranscriptome of Aedes aegypti”
• ViPR BRC
  • Abraham Brass (Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard University): “Creation of a Dengue Virus-Host Interaction Database Using Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics”
  • Lynn W. Enquist, and Moriah L. Szpara (Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University): “Deep Sequencing and Neuronal Microarrays for Functional Genomic Analysis of Herpes Simplex Virus”