An $11 million grant from the National Institutes of Health will allow Dartmouth Medical School researchers to collaborate with other biologists and statisticians from across New England to study environmental toxins and humans' susceptibility to disease, according to researchers interviewed by The Dartmouth. The grant will fund a new Center of Biomedical Research Excellence, which pools resources from DMS, Harvard University and other universities in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire.
The Center of Biomedical Research Excellence one of many centers founded by the NIH in 23 states will be stationed at DMS. Each center sponsors a principle investigator who works with a team on three to five projects, according to the NIH website.
Jason Moore, a DMS genetics professor who is the principal investigator of the project, was not available for comment by press time.
The new center's research will initially focus on how arsenic, an environmental toxin, makes humans more susceptible to disease, according to University of Maine immunologist Carol Kim, a researcher involved with the project.
New Hampshire is a state with one of the highest levels of arsenic in the country, according to Craig Tomlinson, a DMS professor of pharmacology and toxicology who is involved in the project.
"The towns and homes of people with private water wells can have really high levels [of arsenic]," Tomlinson said. "I don't think anyone has looked at the effects of arsenic on health as much as we've proposed to do."
Kim said that even the arsenic levels that are considered safe to drink have rendered zebrafish more susceptible to bacterial and viral infections in her previous experiments. Kim's lab focuses its research on innate immunity to infectious diseases, or the body's immediate response to viruses and bacteria, according to Kim. Her lab will research ways to enhance innate immunity in order to protect the host from infection.
As part of the experiments conducted in the new center, Kim will expose zebrafish with cystic fibrosis to arsenic and then infect them with bacteria that normally cause problems for cystic fibrosis patients, she said. The fish will then undergo deep sequencing analysis, according to Kim.
Jiang Gui, community and family medicine professor at DMS who focuses on biostatistics, will assist Kim in making sense of the "tons of data" that will result from Kim's study. As modelers overlay the Zebrafish data with human data, the team can see which genes are important in humans.
The strength of the NIH grant lies in matching "math people" with "biology people," according to Clare Bates Congdon, a computational biologist at the University of Southern Maine, whose contribution to the project will involve non-coding DNA.
"Until recently, non-coding DNA was called junk DNA because they didn't do anything," Congdon said. "But now we understand that there are functional genes in the non-coding region."
Non-coding DNA can determine how proteins are made, but due to the large amount of non-coding DNA, it is often difficult to determine which genes are relevant to experiments, according to Gui.
Tomlinson, who is also the director of a genomic and microray lab for the project, said researchers will be able to look at all the genes simultaneously to see how gene expression is altered by exposure to arsenic.
"The grant is focused on doing quantitative work on these biological problems," Congdon said. "It is really unique in that it is pairing us across disciplines. It's unusual in having the network in these three states New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine."
