Word: salk
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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Biologists offer this analogy as an explanation: if the genome is the hardware, then the epigenome is the software. "I can load Windows, if I want, on my Mac," says Joseph Ecker, a Salk Institute biologist and leading epigenetic scientist. "You're going to have the same chip in there, the same genome, but different software. And the outcome is a different cell type...
This past October, the NIH grant started to pay off. Scientists working jointly at a fledgling, largely Internet-based effort called the San Diego Epigenome Center announced with colleagues from the Salk Institute - the massive La Jolla, Calif., think tank founded by the man who discovered the polio vaccine - that they had produced "the first detailed map of the human epigenome...
...grandiose. In fact, the scientists had mapped only a certain portion of the epigenomes of two cell types (an embryonic stem cell and another basic cell called a fibroblast). There are at least 210 cell types in the human body - and possibly far more, according to Ecker, the Salk biologist, who worked on the epigenome maps. Each of the 210 cell types is likely to have a different epigenome. That's why Ecker calls the $190 million grant from NIH "peanuts" compared with the probable end cost of figuring out what all the epigenetic marks are and how they work...