NIH Chemical Genomics Center

人类基因组计划使得利用高通量技术在遗传和分子水平上研究生物学和疾病成为可能。美国国立卫生研究院化学基因组学中心（NCGC）与世界各地的研究人员合作，发现与健康和疾病相关的新基因、途径和细胞表型的小分子化学探针。NCGC与分子文库筛选中心网络的校外中心一起，正在探索由人类和其他基因组编码的大量蛋白质（数量远远超过100,000），这些蛋白质没有小分子化学探针被识别出来。这样做，这一倡议有望大大提高对基因及其蛋白质产物功能机制的理解，并加速基于基因组知识的人类疾病治疗方法的开发。今年，NCGC的产能大幅增加，员工从19人增加到30人，并从初创阶段进入生产阶段。NCGC目前与校内、校外和制药/生物技术部门的研究人员有20多个积极的合作。在本报告期间，NCGC进行了28次筛选，包括超过1000万次小型分析，并向公共PubChem数据库存储了超过700万个数据字段。在这一年中，NCGC开发了一种新的筛选范例，称为定量高通量筛选（qHTS），它产生的筛选数据比传统的HTS要好得多；这项研究发表在2006年8月的《美国国家科学院院刊》上。

The Human Genome Project has made it possible to study biology and disease at the genetic and molecular level using high-throughput technologies. The NIH Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC) collaborates with researchers throughout the world to discover small molecule chemical probes of novel genes, pathways, and cellular phenotypes relevant to health and disease. The NCGC, together with the extramural centers of the Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network, is exploring the enormous number of proteins (numbering well over 100,000) encoded by the human and other genomes for which no small molecule chemical probes have been identified. In so doing, this initiative promises to significantly improve the understanding of mechanisms by which genes and their protein products function and accelerate the development of therapies for human diseases based on knowledge of the genome. This year has seen a dramatic increase in the NCGC's capacities, increasing staff from 19 to 30, and moving operations from start-up into production. The NCGC currently has over 20 active collaborations with researchers in the intramural, extramural, and pharma/biotech sectors. In this reporting period, the NCGC performed 28 screens comprising over 10 million miniaturized assays, and desposited over 7 million data fields to the public PubChem database. During this year, the NCGC developed a new screening paradigm, called Quantitative High Throughput Screening (qHTS), that generates dramatically better screening data than conventional HTS; this was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August 2006.