Biomedical Grant Aids Genome Project

A five-year, $9.6 million grant is enabling Frank Millet, director of the University of Arkansas’ Center for Protein Structure and Function, to contribute research to the international Human Genome Project.

The project, being conducted by cooperating researchers around the world, is aimed at decoding human DNA to find leads to effective new treatments and preventions for diseases like cancer and leukemia.

Thanks to Millet’s National Institute of Health grant, in-depth protein research will be conducted on campus in Fayetteville. The grant’s first installment, $1.8 million, came in October. Millet is now disbursing subgrant awards to investigators in the UA’s departments of biochemistry and molecular biology.

The overall grant will be used to support nine senior, eight junior and five new faculty members.

Most of the first round of funding, about $600,000, will go toward acquiring a nuclear resonance spectrometer. The machine will enable UA researchers to better analyze human proteins. That’s important, Millet said, since proteins produce the energy that cells need to survive and be viable. Most diseases are associated with defects that arise in human proteins.

But the result of Millet’s work could benefit more than the biomedical community. Scientists at the UA’s highly regarded John W. Tyson Center of Excellence for Poultry Science have also expressed interest.

“Any progress we make on studying protein structures could have important consequences in understanding poultry diseases,” Millet said. “This is primarily a medical project, but other sciences will be directly affected by protein discoveries, and the Poultry Science Center is interested in collaborating on some work.”

Poultry industry firms like Tyson Foods Inc. and George’s Inc. in Springdale spend millions combatting bacteria like E. coli. But, Millet said, the functions of about 38 percent of the 4,288 proteins encoded in E. coli’s genome are unknown.