Faculty-to-Faculty

Associate IGB Director, G. Wesley Hatfield and IGB Structural Genomics Program Leader, Richard Lathrop exemplify a productive IGB cross-discipline research partnership. Hatfield, Professor of Microbiology & Molecular Genetics, and Lathrop, Assoc. Professor of Computer Science, have patented a technology to produce synthetic genes. Previously seed funded by IGB, this work is currently being funded by a UC BREP grant and a recently awarded $1.5 M NSF Information and Technology Research (ITR) grant. This project has already benefited researchers in several other life science disciplines, and has led to other synergistic collaborations, including plans for a new IGB/UCI core facility.

Multiple Institution

IGB and the UCI Center for Virus Research (CVR), under the leadership of IGB member Luis Villarreal, have collaborated on a major bioterrorism project. The core technology for this project derives from IGB-seeded faculty-to-faculty research. The project, recently awarded a $1.25 M five-year NIH grant, seeks to produce genes for in vitro protein synthesis to be used to screen infected patient sera for bacterial antigens that might be useful for vaccines, and to identify efficacious drug targets.

IGB Systems Biology Program Leader, Eric Mjolsness, together with other IGB members, collaborators at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), have led a major multi-investigator effort in Systems Biology that has also been recognized by major funding.

IGB—Industry

Since its inception, the Institute has had close ties with Sun Microsystems. Recently, Director Pierre Baldi and other IGB researchers were awarded an NSF Major Research Instrumentation grant on which Sun Microsystems and other technology vendors collaborated.

Illumina, Inc., recently participated in and supported the IGB-hosted 2003 Southern California Biotechnology Symposium.