Feng Yue, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State College of Medicine, has been awarded a five-year, $1.91 million Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant will help to support his study on how genetic variants contribute to gene regulation and three-dimensional organization of DNA molecules that influence human diseases.
Although recent studies have discovered thousands of genetic variations that are associated with human diseases or traits, how these variants contribute to the development of disease are not known, mainly due to the majority of them being located in regions of the DNA that are not used to encode proteins. That said, great strides in genomic technologies have been made recently that allow researchers to link these variants to their target genes.
“This grant will help us make major progress in understanding the mechanism and effects of genetic variations toward human disease,” Yue said.
The specific grant is from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Part of the NIH’s outstanding investigator award program, the Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award offers greater stability and flexibility to enhance scientific productivity and the chances for important breakthroughs.
The funding will allow Yue to use a combination of high throughput genomic experiments, computational modeling and functional assays in an attempt to reveal how to identify noncoding causal variants for human diseases, and ultimately uncover key molecular interactions related to gene regulation and human diseases.