September 16, 2009

BAR HARBOR, Maine — A new $2.1 million National Institutes of Health grant to The Jackson Laboratory will fund construction of space for the institution's expanding bioinformatics and computational biology programs.

Jackson Laboratory bioinformatics and computational biology scientists develop the ever-growing quantity of genetic data into sophisticated tools, available to the worldwide research community, for understanding gene function. To meet the rapidly expanding demand for these data and tools, the Laboratory is recruiting four new faculty members over the next five years with expertise in applying computational approaches to solving biological problems.

The grant from the National Center for Research Resources will provide space for the new investigators and the additional computing hardware needed to support the increasingly data- and computation-intensive research of the entire Jackson Laboratory scientific staff.

The award is part of the federal government's economic stimulus initiative known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). The new grant brings The Jackson Laboratory's share of ARRA funding to more than $5.8 million, including grants for research in cancer, diabetes, HDL cholesterol and neurological diseases. Details about all ARRA-funded grants are available on the NIH website.

The Jackson Laboratory is a nonprofit biomedical research institution based in Bar Harbor, Maine. Its mission is to discover the genetic basis for preventing, treating and curing human diseases, and to enable research and education for the global biomedical community.

This article originally appeared on the The Jackson Laboratory website. Reposted with permission.