A MULTI-CENTRE BIOINFORMATIC PROJECT FOR A SYSTEMATIC INVESTIGATION OF GENES EXPRESSED IN HUMAN SKELETAL MUSCLE

The sequence of the human genome is progressively becoming available to the scientific community, making a great impact on biomedical research. But, the pace at which this knowledge will be applied and implemented into useful applications will greatly depend on our ability to understand the function of the different genes in normal and pathological conditions. Bioinformatics has a central role in this emerging field of functional genomics, and the aim of this multi-centre project is to join the complementing expertise in bioinformatics, developed by the three participating groups, with the final objective of contributing to a better understanding of the genes expressed in skeletal muscle in normal and pathological conditions. This project is based on the muscle-TRAIT database (http://muscle.cribi.unipd.it) that has been developed at the CRIBI Biotechnology Centre of the University of Padova with te financial support of the Telethon Foundation. This database is a collection of information related to over 5,000 genes expressed in human skeletal muscle. With this research we want to investigate several functional aspects of these genes, at different levels: at the genomic level the research work will focus on the promotors that regulate the expression of these genes, at the messenger RNA level we will search for functional motifs in the untranslated regions and at the protein level we will investigate the possibility of protein-protein interactions.