A multinational collaboration of researchers assembled to conduct third-generation genome projects was announced in Ottawa yesterday (May 5) at a conference funded by Canadian agencies and attended by more than 75 scientists from Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Italy, and the United States.
The goal of the International Regulome Consortium (IRC), which will be based in Ottawa, will be “to utilize the tools of proteomics and genomics to characterize the protein components of transcriptional complexes containing all potential transcription factors and to identify and validate the complete set of their binding sites and corresponding target genes,” according to the IRC's Web site.
“The project will utilize the mouse, as this is the only mammalian system tractable for comprehensive molecular genetic studies,” according to the site, although the IRC's scientific director, Michael Rudnicki, senior scientist at the Ottawa Health Research Institute, said there will be a human component...