The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced Tuesday grant awards totaling nearly $8 million for research towards understanding the workings of single cells. The grants are supported by the NIH Common Fund’s Single Cell Analysis Program whose goal is to learn about the cell-to-cell variation that exists within a population of cells. By understanding the normal versus abnormal heterogeneity that exists within healthy and diseased groups of cells, it may be possible to target diseases at the cellular level and develop personalized medicine. A total of 25 grants were awarded, and nine of those grants were developed by ASCB members, listed below.
- Bo Huang of University of California, San Francisco
“Analyzing genomic elements in live animals by CRISPR imaging”
- Arjun Raj of University of Pennsylvania
“Validation and development of single nucleotide variant RNA FISH in single cells in culture and tissue“
- Dawen Cai of University of Michigan
“MACS: A genetic labeling tool to depict the complete neuroblast lineage of all neurons in individual Drosophila brains“
- John Paran of University of Alabama at Birmingham for his project
“Light-Induced Genetic Alterations within Single Cell of a Live Vertebrate Animal“
- Zev Jordan Gartner of University of California, San Francisco
“Identifying the intercellular networks regulating estrogen receptor expression with a high definition single cell printer”
- Sylvia Evans (co-PI with Kelly Frazer) of University of California, San Francisco
“Regulatory Genomic Studies in a Cohort of IPS Cell Derived Cardiomyocytes”
- Marc Kirschner of Harvard University
“A high-throughput method for simultaneous profiling of mRNA and protein levels”
- Erik Snapp (co-PI with Matthew Levy) of Albert Einstein College of Medicine
“Fluorescent probes for quantitation of secretory protein levels in single cells”
- Deirdre Meldrum of Arizona State University at Tempe
“In Situ Single Cell Laser Lysis and Downstream qRT-PCR Profiling”
About the Author:
Christina Szalinski is a science writer with a PhD in Cell Biology from the University of Pittsburgh.
