Driving Biological Projects
In general, DBPs are expected to be early adopters of each center's technology and collaborate broadly with the center's activities, helping stimulate new creative ideas and applications for its technology, and provide feedback on existing endeavors. The key personnel of DBPs attend center project meetings, participate in regular teleconferences, and contribute to all aspects of their respective center.
NCBO currently collaborates with researchers in three Driving Biological Projects (DBPs) that represent a broad range of biomedical research endeavors. These projects were selected for their scientific merit in answering important biomedical questions and advancing their disciplines. They also act to stimulate the Center and enhance its technologies.
Michael Ashburner, University of Cambridge
Interpretation of genomic data in Drosophila: Linking Mutations in Drosophila to Human Disease
Monte Westerfield, University of Oregon
Interpretation of genomic data in Zebrafish: Relating Zebrafish Phenotypes to Human Disease Genes
Ida Sim, University of California, San Francisco
Analysis of clinical-trial data for therapy of HIV/AIDS: Analyzing Evidence in HIV Clinical Trials
The first two DBPs (Drosophila genomics and Zebrafish phenotype) push up from the genome to the phenome. The third DBP (HIV) pushes down from clinical research and practice. The DBPs share the common activities of accessing, editing, and using ontologies to describe biomedical knowledge in their particular domains and of using that ontological knowledge to annotate and analyze biomedical data.
The Center will support additional driving biological projects and collaborating research activities. Please see Working With The Center for information on potential avenues of collaboration. See also the NIH Collaborating R01 and R21 program Collaborations with National Centers for Biomedical Computing for research grants to collaborate with the National Centers for Biomedical Computation.