Project to amass databases describing gene expression, regulation and genetics data from birth to adolescence microbiologystudy

Oregon Health & Science University has a leading role in a new database designed to track the normal expression of genes in organs and tissues from prenatal development through adulthood. Researchers describe the overall project in a Perspective article published today in the journal Nature.

The project, known as developmental Genotype-Tissue Expression, or dGTEx, will amass exhaustive databases describing gene expression, regulation and genetics data from birth to adolescence in people from across the country who have magnanimously elected to donate their bodies to science. These donors will be matched to prenatal through young adult tissues derived from rhesus macaques and common marmosets, species of nonhuman primates considered to be developmentally similar to people.

The Oregon National Primate Research Center at OHSU is leading the nonhuman primate component of the project.

“It will be really comprehensive, involve every organ in the body and from every stage of development,” said Victoria Roberts, Ph.D., associate professor of reproductive and developmental sciences at the ONPRC.

“The goal is to assemble a vast base of knowledge about how genes are expressed in the normal course of development. When you know what’s normal, then you can look at what’s abnormal in diseases and pathologies and, ultimately, develop new tools to treat or prevent those conditions.”

The overall project involves the National Institutes of Health as well as laboratories and research institutions across the country.

“A rigorous understanding of normal human development is essential to understand the origins of many diseases,” the authors write in Nature. “Inherited disorders, ranging from congenital malformations and heart defects to neurological disorders can have their origins during gestation.”

Don Conrad, Ph.D., professor and genetics division chief at the ONPRC, is the principal investigator for the project at OHSU. Conrad noted that the project expands on an earlier version of the Genotype-Tissue Expression project that focused only on sampling postmortem tissue from human adults.

“Children are not small adults,” Roberts said. “Gene function and expression change dramatically over the course of a lifetime. The data generated by this project will be available for wide use in the scientific community.”