Biologist Jason Lieb at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has received a $7.3 million, four-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support genomic research involving UNC and seven other institutions.
Lieb’s group is studying how and where proteins interact with the genome and how these interactions affect the biology of living cells.
Lieb is an assistant professor of biology in the College of Arts and Sciences who holds a joint appointment at the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences.
He was one of 10 scientists awarded grants totaling $57 million from the NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute as part of an effort to identify all functional elements in the genomes of the fruit fly and the roundworm. The fruit fly and roundworm are “model” organisms whose genomes are compact but share many similarities with the genomes of humans. Scientists rely on these smaller, model organisms to identify common genes, proteins and processes that underlie human medical conditions.
The DNA sequence information in the human genome is read and interpreted by proteins, and without interactions between proteins and DNA, life would not exist, Lieb said.
“In our project, we aim to identify specific stretches of DNA and DNA-associated proteins that together control how genes are turned on and off at the right place and time, and how chromosomes are replicated and segregated during cell divisions,” he said.
Lieb is the principal investigator on the NIH project, which also involves the following partners: University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, San Diego; NimbleGen Systems Inc. in Madison, Wis.; the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston; Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel; and Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind.
Lieb received his undergraduate degree from UNC and his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.
