The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded a major grant to an innovative Spanish research project. This is the cell atlas database and tools for aquatic symbiosis, to which it has awarded funding of 3.78 million dollars (3.46 million euros) for a 38-month period, which began in September.

The research is led by scientist Arnau Sebé Pedrós from the Sebé Pedrós Lab, which is part of the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), an international biomedical research institute of excellence funded by the Government of Catalonia.

Genomic coding
The cell atlas of species attempts to answer major questions in the field of biology about the genomic coding of the various cell types that make up multicellular organisms. New technologies in this field have paved the way for comparative analysis of genome regulation in species representing different levels of biological complexity.

The Sebé Pedrós Lab has developed its own methodology, combining high-throughput chromatin profiling and single-cell genomics technologies with advanced computational methods to dissect and compare cell type programmes and gene regulatory architectures in phylogenetically diverse systems.

Cellular differentiation
The work aims to clarify which genome regulatory mechanisms are linked to the origin of cell type differentiation. It also aims to reveal when major animal cell types, such as neurons, came into being and evolved more than once, and how the gene regulatory networks of animal cell types evolve.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation was established in 2000 by the Intel co-founder and his wife with the aim of “generating positive outcomes for future generations”. It primarily funds projects driven by non-profit organisations and related to environmental conservation, science, patient care or the San Francisco Bay Area.

^{Photo: Centre for Genomic Regulation}