NSF Award
0333789
The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research has been awarded a Small Grant for Exploratory Research to find rules for predicting the optimal oligonucleotide to silence a gene. A promising new technology, siRNA (short interfering RNA), provides an experimental method for studying the function of a gene by reducing or eliminating its expression. This technology is being used to study biological processes in model organisms. A properly selected short double stranded RNA sequence (~21 nucleotides) can silence the expression of a gene. However, selection of the best sequence among the many choices is still more of an art than a science. The team will use experimental laboratory data consisting of multiple siRNAs for many genes. Using novel computational approaches, they will attempt to discover a set of rules that will help to predict the optimal sequence for gene silencing. Because of the nature of the data, new statistical methods will need to be applied to the data. The computational tools built based on these rules will be useful to scientists wishing to silence specific genes, specific gene families, or even specific biological pathways within a genome.
