HAEMCODE: an online web tool contributes to research into blood cells
A community science initiative - HAEMCODE - has been welcomed for its contribution to our understanding of blood cells and ultimately, to the development of better treatments for leukaemia. We curated more than 300 different studies from a wide range of mouse cell line models to create a compendium that covered 84 transcription factors - Professor Bertie Gottgens A new initiative called HAEMCODE (developed by the Haematopoietic Stem Cell Lab at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and hosted by the Wellcome Trust and MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute) demonstrates how community-based science can improve our understanding of the functions of genes - and, in particular, the mechanisms that determine the function of normal and abnormal blood cells. Large scale DNA sequencing efforts were first initiated over 30 years ago following the conception of the Human Genome Project, with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute just outside of Cambridge making numerous key contributions to this initial era of genome research. In the early days, genome sequencing was limited to large research organisations. But, by virtue of huge advances in technologies (so-called next generation sequencing), the sequencing of large amounts of DNA has become increasingly faster and cheaper, with the costs of sequencing a whole human genome having fallen from $95,000,000 in 2001 to less than $5,000 in 2013. "As the result of technology developed here in Cambridge, notably by a spin-out from the Chemistry Department led by Shankar Balasubramanian, biomedical research has become democratised.
