Canada to lead group studying how genes make cells work - Five-nation consortium will examine how genes are controlled in groups

Tom Spears
The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, April 21, 2004

A five-nation consortium led by Canada expects to launch itself in Ottawa next month, leaping ahead from the Human Genome Project to learn not just what genes we have, but how they make a cell work.

The International Regulome Consortium will study the mysterious switches that make each of our 30,000 genes do its work only at certain times and in certain cells.

And its founding members hope that by identifying groups of genes that all switch on and off the same way, they'll find the key to controlling them, a major goal in medical research today. Genes that become active or inactive at the wrong times can cause a wide range of diseases.

"This project has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of how cells function. Right now we study one gene, one phenomenon. We want to understand how all of these controls function together" in the overall life of a whole cell, said Dr. Michael Rudnicki of the Ottawa Health Research Institute. He's a prominent stem cell and genomics researcher expected to head the new consortium.

"We would arrive at what you could call the virtual cell. In a computational way we would be able to understand the complete functioning of the cell at the genetic level," he said.

"Now we know what the genes are, but we really understand very poorly at the level of regulation -- how they are controlled," he said.

Scientists from five countries meet here May 3 to 5, expecting to make the new consortium official.

Just as people are coming to terms with words like genome and proteome, the new International Regulome Consortium is set to push our vocabulary a little farther.

It will study regulons.

A regulon means genes that are regulated together, as a group, like lights in different parts of a house linked with a single on-off switch. These genes kick into action as a team.

The regulome is all of our regulons, just as the human genome is the full set of 30,000 genes (plus the rest of our DNA), the proteome is all the proteins, and so on.

Scientists can tell when a gene is working and when it isn't. They know what many of these genes do. They know that a certain pattern of gene switching indicates a nerve cell and a different group of active genes indicates a muscle cell.

But why genes switch on and off when they do is often a mystery.

Participants in next month's workshop are coming from Britain, Singapore, France and the United States. Canada would be the leader of the group.

Next month's organizing conference is being funded by Genome Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Ontario Genomics Institute and the Ottawa Life Sciences Council.

"Science increasingly in the world is going big," putting together the brains from different research labs, said Peter Walker, dean of medicine at the University of Ottawa, which is an OHRI partner.

"It's a superb initiative, superb opportunity, and I look forward to really exciting things as a result.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2004

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