Massey scientist in Nature

A Massey University computational biologist has had a paper published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

Dr Patrick Biggs, a senior lecturer in the Institute of Veterinary, Animal and Biomedical Sciences, carried out the research as part of a team when he was working at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

The paper, A conditional knockout resource for the genome-wide study of mouse gene function, outlines a bank of mouse embryonic stem cells that have targeted mutations in individual genes for use in genomic research. The effort was for a centrally EU-funded project called EUCOMM.

“The plan was to take as much of the mouse genome as possible and create these cells that had an individual gene disrupted,” Dr Biggs says. “Then scientists can request the cell lines and use these to do research.”

So far, about 5800 mouse genes have been added to the library where scientists can request a cell line for research.

“These researchers would be doing cell culture work,” Dr Biggs says. “They would study what happens when a gene is knocked out in terms of a pathway; does it affect how that pathway reacts to drugs for example. Others would do stem cell research, looking at wider effects of disrupting a gene.”

Dr Bill Skarnes led the research team at the Sanger Institute. Dr Biggs was informatics group leader for the project, overseeing the vast amounts of computational data, devising ways of storing it, and disseminating that data to the scientific community.

Dr Biggs is currently working with Professor Nigel French at the Hopkirk Institute on veterinary public health and food safety research. He is also collaborating with other Institute researchers on several genomics projects.