SCI core bioinformaticians Patrick Lombard and Lila Diamanti have contributed to the creation of HAEMCODE, a large scale repository for transcription factor binding maps in mouse blood cells. Transcription factors are proteins that bind to specific DNA sequences, thereby controlling the flow of genetic information from DNA to messenger RNA. The HAEMCODE project is overseen by SCI member Professor Bertie Gottgens, and is designed to harness the power of genome-scale information to improve our understanding of both normal and leukaemic blood stem cells.
Featuring in the October issue of Nature Methods, this study demonstrates that the compilation of all data sets produced by the wider scientific community provides a viable alternative to the reliance on large-scale genome centres for the production of comprehensive data repositories.
The researchers also developed a web interface HAEMCODE to provide data access as well as a range of online analysis tools, designed to be useful to both experimentalist and computational biologists.
The research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research, the Medical Research Council (MRC), Cancer Research UK, the Cambridge National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre and core support grants from the Wellcome Trust–MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute