Two U of T projects receive $1 million each for bioinformatics research
Professor
Michael Brudno of the Department of Computer Science is working on
software to help doctors determine a patient's risk of developing
disease (photo by Norman Wong)
Two University of Toronto research projects have won $1 million each
in funding from the Government of Canada through Genome Canada and the
Ontario Genomics Institute.
The Genome Canada 2012 Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
competition, a partnership with the Canadian Institutes of Health
Research, supports the development of the next generation of tools to
deal with the large influx of data produced by today’s genomics
technologies
“Bioinformatics becomes increasingly important as researchers are able to generate more and more data,” said Judith Chadwick, U of T’s assistant vice-president, Research and Innovation.
“Tools that help us make sense of these data are the keys to better
health and quality of life," Chadwick said. "On behalf of the University
of Toronto, thanks to Genome Canada for these awards—and to the Ontario
Genomics Institute for facilitating them. And congratulations to the
researchers on these richly-deserved awards.”
Professors Michael Brudno and Gary Bader
received $998,546 to develop software that will help doctors use a
patient’s genome to search for information about his or her risk of
developing a disease.
“Genome sequencing is evolving from being a research project to a
routine medical test,” says Brudno. He and Bader want to help clinicians
interpret these tests to better target medical treatment.
The data generated when a human genome is sequenced are in the
terabyte range—much more than any human could make sense of. (A terabyte
of paper stacked would make a 66,000-mile tower.) The team’s software
will help distil the data down to a few megabytes of information that is
actually useful. (A megabyte is roughly equivalent to 500 pages of
text.)
“Often it is hard to figure out the exact type of disorder a patient
has,” says Brudno. “Two disorders that look the same may have different
genetic causes—and need different courses of treatment.” Sequencing a
patient’s genome allows for precisely targeted treatment.
The software can also be used to help healthy patients understand
their risk of developing genetic diseases such as cancer, diabetes and
Alzheimer’s.
The funding, half of which comes from Genome Canada, and half from
the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), will allow the researchers to
test and refine their software in collaboration doctors treating
patients at SickKids. Brudno notes that a previous grant from the
Ontario Genomics Institute was instrumental in getting the project
started.
Brudno is affiliated with U of T's Department of Computer Science,
the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Bimolecular Research, the Banting
and Best Department of Medical Research and SickKids, where he is the
director of the Centre for Computational Medicine. Bader is affiliated
with the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research, the Donnelly
Centre for Cellular and Bimolecular Research, the Department of Computer
Science, the Department of Molecular Genetics and the Samuel Lunenfeld
Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Professors Nicholas Provart of the Department of Cell & Systems Biology and the Centre for the Analysis of Genome Evolution and Function and Stephen Wright
of the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and the Centre
for the Analysis of Genome Evolution and Function received $1 million to
develop visualization tools and applications to accelerate advances in
plant biology, which are important for feeding, housing, clothing and
providing energy to the world’s growing population.
Recent advances in DNA sequencing and other high throughput
technologies have generated a deluge of information about Arabidopsis
thaliana, an organism that biologists use as a model plant species—“the
fruit fly of plants,” says Provart.
Interpreting and visualizing the data, Provart says, “can be
overwhelming for biologists, who aren’t necessarily skilled in the art
of writing computer code.”
Currently, plant biologists in search of genetic data have to visit
multiple sources and the result is fragmentation and inefficiency—and
useful data often ends up languishing.
He and Wright will participate in the development of international
portal that will make existing data available to scientists in a desktop
interface where they can pick and choose the data they want with the
click of a mouse. The portal will help plant biologists advance a
variety of research questions, many of which will be essential to
supporting the world’s population, which is expected to reach nine
billion by 2050.
Half the funding for Provart and Wright’s project will come from
Genome Canada, the other half from the Moore Foundation and other
sources.
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