Project description
Linking non-coding DNA variants to human disease
Approximately only 1-2 % of the human genome codes for proteins. The remainder consists of non-coding regions which play a key role in regulating how genes are expressed. Despite their obvious impact on phenotype and disease risk, we currently lack experimental evidence on the precise effect of these regions. The ERC-funded Seq2Func-NC project aims to address this gap in knowledge and study non-coding variants on a large scale. In this context, researchers will develop prime editing and novel screening methods to explore how mutations in introns and regulatory regions impact gene expression. The study will identify new disease-linked variants and build predictive models to link DNA sequence alterations to their biological effects.
Objective
Deciphering how genetic variants lead to disease can advance precision diagnostics and mechanistically informed therapies. Yet, our ability to link variants in the human genome’s vast noncoding regions to phenotypic consequences is highly limited. This stems largely from a lack of experimental evidence on individual variants’ functional effects. Here, we propose to develop and deploy a suite of new genome editing methods to generate functional data for noncoding variants at unprecedented scale.
First, we will leverage a prime editing screening platform we have recently established to systematically ask how intronic variants and 5’-untranslated region (5’UTR) variants lead to loss of function (LoF) across dozens of human disease genes. Second, we will interrogate relationships between regulatory sequence variants, transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs), and genomic contexts across diverse cell types using novel methods to link variants to effects on messenger RNA (mRNA) levels. Third, we will uncover new noncoding variants underlying disease by combining variant effect prediction with large-scale functional assessment.
Collectively, this work will establish new technologies to experimentally characterize noncoding variants, delineate sequence-function relationships from 100,000s of variant effect measurements, and substantially advance our ability to predict, identify, and engineer noncoding variants of functional importance.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences genetics RNA
- natural sciences biological sciences genetics genomes
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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NW1 1AT London
United Kingdom
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