Genomics research received a boost with a $15.5 million government grant awarded to the Molecular Sciences Institute.

The National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., awarded the five-year grant to support the MSI's Center for Genomic Experimentation and Computation. Simultaneously, the independent, nonprofit research laboratory was named one of four Centers of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS).

The NHGRI also gave grants to three other CEGS: two to the University of Washington in Seattle, one to Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., and another to Yale University in New Haven, Conn. The NHGRI plans to name about 10 CEGS in a three-year period.

The CEGS are aimed at analyzing the vast amount of biological information contained within data collected through the Human Genome Project.

In the case of Berkeley, Calif.-based MSI, the grant supports its Alpha Project, an early stage effort to examine communication within cells and to develop computer models that predict intracellular signaling. The research is designed to enable more precisely targeted treatments for diseases, as not much is understood about how individual proteins within cells interact with each other to cause diseases or other complex outcomes.

"The Alpha Project really started up probably about five months ago," said Lauren Ha, the project's administrator as well as MSI's vice president of administration. "The parts were here and being done on a pilot study basis, and we have put them together into a coherent and large research effort."

The Alpha Project focuses on information within cells in the pheromone signal transduction pathway in baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). While the cells belong to a simple, single cell-organism, they have much in common with more complex organisms, including humans. The Alpha Project, its research methods and computer models developed comprise a pilot study to explore similar pathways in higher organisms.

"It is going to take some time, but we hope that in the next five years, we'll have a predictive model of this particular pathway," Ha told BioWorld Today. "There's a lot of simulation work that's already there. What we need desperately is the experimental work, and some of that requires whole new experimental methods to be developed."

The Alpha Project brings together 40 researchers, faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students from fields including biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, computer science and physics. Their affiliated institutions include the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, the University of California at Berkeley and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.

"In one sponsored funding, the grant will support a coordinated effort between those 40 researchers from different disciplines, from four different institutions, focusing on one important biological question," Ha said. "Secondly, the grant [is an example of] the federal government funding the next-generation Human Genome Project - what comes after the genome? We need technology to try to understand the function, and sequence is not enough. Sequence helps us to illuminate the field, but it's not everything."

MSI, which openly publishes and releases data, methods and materials, plans to make public its findings through an approach by which future findings also are made available.

"We want to develop what we term an open source biology," Ha said. "We may release materials, even biological materials, to the public, and as a condition to receiving these materials, any modifications you make you need to also make open."

She said such open licensing might speed findings from the discovery stage and to development for agriculture and drug discovery.

Founded in 1996, MSI is supported by other federal grants from the NIH and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, as well as from philanthropic contributions.

In other recent NIH grant news, its National Institute of General Medical Sciences last week established the Centers of Excellence in Complex Biomedical Systems Research. Two new center awards totaled $4.5 million for the first year of funding.

The University of Washington's San Juan Island, Wash., laboratories garnered $2.1 million to investigate how groups of genes control the development of embryos and the functional and mechanical organization of cell structure and motion. Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will receive $2.4 million to create the Center for Modeling Integrated Metabolic Systems, an effort to mathematically model metabolism in skeletal muscle, brain and liver tissue in response to stresses associated with exercise, diet and oxygen supply.

Also, the NIH will put funds toward future centers of excellence at Boston University, the University of California at Irvine and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.