A Queensland team of researchers from the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) at UQ has played an integral role in the world-first mapping of the functional output of the mouse genome, or `transcriptome`, published today in the prestigious science journal Nature.
The world-first will give scientists vital insights into causes of genetic diseases such as chronic inflammatory disease, Alzheimer`s disease, different types of cancers and cystic fibrosis to name a few.
The team of six from the IMB were the largest foreign contingent in the international consortium headed by the RIKEN Genome Sciences Centre in Yokohama, Japan and part of a formal Collaborative Research Agreement between the two groups.
Head of the IMB team Professor David Hume said their Japanese colleagues acknowledged the leadership role played by several members of the Queensland team, reflecting the growing strength in computational biology in our region.
“The RIKEN findings will greatly accelerate our understanding of complex genetic diseases by identifying new genes involved in key biological processes, and candidate genes contributing to debilitating human diseases," Professor Hume said.
“Many of these pieces of information cannot be determined from a genome sequence alone. We now have a whole new perspective on the way a genome works.
"The importance of the RIKEN Mouse Gene Encyclopedia project cannot be under-estimated. In my opinion, the RIKEN team is amongst the greatest technological innovators in genome science in the world.
"Without the input of our discoveries, the genome sequences of mouse and human are largely uninterpretable.
“While a mammalian genome sequence is just a string of letters, of which only about 1% have any meaning, the `transcriptome` gives us the tools to decide where the words and sentences (the genes) actually start and finish. Without it, we cannot read the book of life."
Professor Hume also said this work will certainly revolutionise his own research in the field of chronic inflammatory disease.
The RIKEN project has identified many new very large and very small protein-coding messenger RNAs, unrecognised splicing events, anti-sense transcripts, genes unique to a particular mammal, and genes not encoding a protein.
The collaboration between IMB and RIKEN is ongoing, and an important part of future research ventures at the Queensland institute.
The IMB team comprised of Professor David Hume, Dr Sean Grimmond, Dr Rohan Teasdale, Dr Tim Ravasi, Ms Christine Wells and Mr Al Forest.
Other participants came from major genome science centres in Japan, the US and Europe, notably the Institute for Genomic Research (USA), National Centre for Biotechnology Information (USA), The Jackson Laboratory (USA) and the European Bioinformatics Consortium.
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