Ali Mortazavi to share $10 million in NIH funding for critical genome mapping

The National Institutes of Health is expanding its effort to create a fundamental genomics resource for scientific use in studying human health and disease. And through its Encyclopedia of DNA Elements Project, UCI assistant professor of developmental & cell biology Ali Mortazavi will share $10 million in grant funding over four years with the California Institute of Technology to establish one of eight mapping centers across the nation to pinpoint where genes and the regulatory elements that control them lie within the genome. With this award, the UCI-Caltech Precision Transcriptome Center will be able to explore the structure of all expressed genes using state-of-the-art, long-read sequencing technologies across a broader diversity of biological samples – including those from individuals with various diseases, as well as highly specialized cells – to expand the catalog of candidate functional elements in the human and mouse genomes.