NIH doles out $11.2M for new super-resolution genome imaging center
A team of Harvard Medical School-led researchers is joining together to establish a new international genome imaging center.
The Center for Genome Imagine seeks to visualize the entire human genome at super-resolution. It’s led by Harvard Medical School researcher Ting Wu, PhD, and backed by an $11.2 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health Centers for Excellence in Genomic Science.
“We already know how to look at relatively small subsections of the genome in super-resolution,” Wu, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, said Aug. 25. “The goal now is to innovate on top of our current foundation of technologies so that, soon, we will have a next generation of methods that will, finally, enable us to look at the entire human genome.”
Current super-resolution imaging techniques can only analyze about 1% of the genome at a time. But the team hopes their new methods can visualize the entire thing and offer insights into genetic diseases and chromosome stability, among many other goals.
Joining Wu is Nicola Neretti, PhD, at Brown University, Erez Lieberman Aiden, PhD, at Baylor College of Medicine and Marc Marti-Renom at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona.
Matt joined Chicago’s TriMed team in 2018 covering all areas of health imaging after two years reporting on the hospital field. He holds a bachelor’s in English from UIC, and enjoys a good cup of coffee and an interesting documentary.