CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL GENOMICS

描述（由申请人提供） 尽管个体间的反应存在巨大的差异， 环境毒素，调查人员只是不明白为什么某些 当受到环境因素和其他因素的挑战时， 保持健康。然而，人们逐渐达成共识，许多复杂的 (and人类发展的疾病是多种疾病的结果。 生物学上独特的基因-基因和基因-环境相互作用。近期 人类和分子遗传学的进步提供了一个无与伦比的 有机会了解基因和遗传变化如何与 环境刺激，以保持健康或引起疾病。主题 该中心的一项研究是利用基因表达谱来了解 环境压力对人类健康的影响。这将通过 建立一个跨学科中心，支持使用 互补的生物系统（人类，小鼠，斑马鱼和蠕虫）， 研究遗传易感性在对以下疾病的致病反应中的作用： 特定类型的环境压力（细菌、营养不良和金属）。 这种方法将使调查人员能够开发和调查 人类疾病的环境模型，代表生物学上独特的基因-环境- 病理生理表型将使用微阵列分析 综合评价生物对环境胁迫的反应 并确定与先天免疫相关的致病机制， 神经管缺陷和过渡金属毒性。最终的结果是一个广泛的 基于但高度集成的程序，有可能使一些 新的，相关的观察。统一这项研究的总体假设 基因表达谱分析将识别基因和致病基因， 对人类环境健康和疾病至关重要的过程。在 汇总了拟议计划中的科学发现， 大大提高了我们对环境毒理学的认识， 基因组学

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant) Despite the tremendous inter-individual variability in the respond to environmental toxins, the investigators simply do not understand why certain people develop disease when challenged with environmental agents and others remain healthy. Yet, there is emerging consensus that many of the complex (and prevalent) diseases that humans develop occur as a result of multiple biologically unique gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. The recent advances in human and molecular genetics has provided an unparalleled opportunity to understand how genes and genetic changes interact with environmental stimuli to either preserve health or cause disease. The theme of this Center is to use gene expression profiling to understand the effect of environmental stresses on human health. This will be accomplished by establishing an interdisciplinary Center that supports the use of complementary biologic systems (humans, mice, zebrafish and worms) to investigate the role of genetic susceptibility in the pathogenic response to specific types of environmental stress (bacteria, malnutrition, and metals). This approach will enable the investigators to develop and investigate environmental models of human disease that represent biologically unique gene-environment- pathophysiological phenotypes. Microarray analyses will be used to comprehensively evaluate the biological response to environmental stress and to identify pathogenic mechanisms that are relevant to innate immunity, neural tube defects, and transition metal toxicity. The end result is a broad based yet highly integrated program that has the potential to make a number of novel, related observations. The overall hypothesis unifying this research program is that gene expression profiling will identify genes and pathogenic processes that are critical to human environmental health and disease. In aggregates the coupled scientific findings from the proposed Program will substantially enhance our understanding of environmental toxicology and genomics.