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The started five years ago with the goal of creating a comprehensive atlas and open database of gene expression and gene regulation across human tissues. This week, the researchers spearheading the NIH-funded effort reporting on the pilot phase of the project.

The epigenome is a collection of physical “amendments” to DNA—things like proteins around which the double helix is wrapped like thread on a spool and chemical tags on the DNA of specific genes that can make them hard to access. This collection of epigenetic factors works together to help give each cell in the body its specific identity by regulating which genes are expressed—it’s a big reason why skin cells don’t get confused with blood cells and why bone cells are full of calcium instead of fat. The epigenome guides differentiation, the process by which embryonic stem cells (ESCs) go from being pluripotent—having the ability to turn into almost any cell type in the body—to taking on one specific identity. But in order for differentiation to happen, the products of a handful of pluripotency genes, which work to maintain the pre-differentiated state of a cell, must be overcome.

For the past seven years, software engineering manager Tom Green has guided the development and maintenance of software tools that support the Genetic Perturbation Platform at the ӳ����ý, where he can be found working with a team of software engineers or consulting with scientists conducting experimental screens. Two decades ago, however, Green was living without electricity or running water in the jungles of Nicaragua, a houseguest of locals in the remote village of Karawala on the Caribbean coast, doing a very different kind of research.

What: A team of researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital, ӳ����ý of MIT and Harvard, and the University of North Carolina has identified an inflammatory molecule that may play an essential role in the development of lupus—a chronic, painful autoimmune disease affecting more than 1.5 million Americans.

It’s not every day that scientists get to offer their colleagues a model system that will enable a wave of future research. “Often you make a discovery, you describe it, and that’s the end of the story,” said Alexander Meissner, a Senior Associate Member at the ӳ����ý of MIT and Harvard. “Here it’s not the end of something, it’s just the beginning.”