The Washington University in St. Louis team participating in the modENCODE project, a massive ongoing effort to map all the elements in living cells that affect whether genes are expressed or silenced, discuss a fruit fly strain with an enzyme that affects gene expression. Team members are (from left): Sarah C.R. Elgin, PhD, the Viktor Hamburger Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences who led the team; Sarah Gadel, lab technician; Nicole C. Riddle, PhD, research assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences; and Tingting Gu, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate in biology. Missing is Sarah Marchetti, a technician. A major paper that includes their part of the modENCODE project has just been published in Nature.
In 2003, the year a complete draft of the human genome was released, the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute launched the ENCODE project (ENCyclopedia of DNA Elements), to develop an encyclopedia of the epigenome, that is, of all of the many factors that can change the expression of the genes without changing the genes.
Four years later, the National Institutes of Health funded modENCODE (the Model Organism ENCylopedia of DNA Elements) to work out the epigenomes of two model organisms: the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, lurker among rotten bananas, and the round worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, slitherer between crumbs of soil.
This was big science with a vengeance. The work had been divided among 21 teams, themselves each made up of multiple labs, all toiling away at universities and companies across the country. And that’s not counting the research groups tasked with coming up with new ways of handling the floods of data pouring out of the labs.
What was going on?
Sarah C.R. Elgin, PhD, the Viktor Hamburger Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, who led the Washington University in St. Louis lab that is part of one of the modENCODE teams, offers an explanation.
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