$6.5 Million Grant for Microarray Center at Yale School of Medicine

Yale School of Medicine is the recipient of a $6.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish a microarray center for research on the nervous system.

The Yale center is a new addition to the NIH Neuroscience Microarray Consortium supported by the NIH Neuroscience Blueprint Institutes, the nation’s primary supporters of basic and applied biomedical research on the brain and nervous system. Four microarray centers at Yale, the University of California at Los Angeles, the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, and Duke University will receive a total of $25 million over five years to support gene expression and SNP analysis.

The microarray consortium was established in 2002 with support from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the National Institute of Mental Health. About 10,000 NIH-funded neuroscientists will be able to further their research through the use of microarray technology that is now sufficiently powerful to simultaneously interrogate the relative level of expression of virtually all of the more than 30,000 genes that are thought to be contained within the human genome.

“The Yale Neuroscience Microarray Center will be closely associated with the Keck Laboratory, which is one of the largest biotechnology laboratories of its kind in academia,” said the principal investigator at Yale, Shrikant Mane, director of the Affymetric GeneChip Resource in the W.M. Keck Foundation Biotechnology Resource Laboratory at Yale. “The award will support gene expression analysis using Affymetrix GeneChips as well as genome level and custom glass slide microarrays prepared in the center; SNP analysis using Affymetrix Arrays; advanced biostatistical analysis; high performance computing, and bioinformatics support needed to effectively interpret the massive amounts of data that result from genome-level analyses.”

Carolyn Slayman, Deputy Dean of Yale School of Medicine, said, “Mane and his colleagues are at the forefront of this fast-moving field. To understand the functioning of the nervous system, it is critical to be able to track highly complex patterns of gene expression.”

The co-investigator at Yale is Samuel Sathyanesan, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry. Key support is provided by the departments of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Psychiatry, the Center for Medical Informatics, Epidemiology and Public Health, and Computer Science.

Additionally, the Yale center will be actively involved in the research needed to evaluate and optimize the application of DNA microarray technology to the complex neuroscience field. “Yale’s strength in the neurosciences will contribute greatly to the consortium’s goal of providing a national resource with broad expertise and capacity in the use of microarrays for expression profiling and SNP genotyping,” Mane said.

Source: Yale University