Europe Launches Project to Map Human Epigenome

The health and research division of the European Commission announced a €30-million project to understand the human epigenome, the constellation of DNA modifications that controls the expression of genes. The project called BLUEPRINT was set up to help scientists understand how the epigenome affects health and disease. Studies have shown that the epigenome plays a critical role in health and disease. However, researchers do not have a reliable database of high-quality, quantitative reference epigenomes against which new data can be compared.

BLUEPRINT unites the efforts of 41 institutions and more than 50 principal researchers from different countries in Europe. The goal of the project is to provide at least 100 reference epigenomes toward the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC)'s goal of generating 1,000 reference epigenomes by 2020. BLUEPRINT has chosen to focus on the blood system since many diagnostic tests rely on blood samples.

"BLUEPRINT is the first big epigenome project to be specifically created in alignment with the IHEC mission," says Peter Jones at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who helped to launch the IHEC. "Blood epigenomes are particularly exciting because we know an awful lot about the biology of how blood stem cells differentiate, but little about the sequence of epigenomic events involved in the processes that are going to be relevant for disease," he added.

Read more at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=europe-41million-human-map-epigenome-project. For more information about BLUEPRINT, visit http://www.blueprint-epigenome.eu/.