College of Biological Sciences
Twin Cities
The goal of this project is to demonstrate the efficacy of Sleeping Beauty (SB) transposons as vectors for non-viral gene delivery to treat mucopolysaccharidosis diseases. A specific goal for development of the SB system for humans is to prove the safety of using transposons that randomly integrate into genomes through genome wide insertion profile analysis. These researchers infuse SB transposons into mouse liver genomes using hydrodynamic injection. They then harvest the DNA from the liver cells, label the restricted DNA with "tags," and submit the DNA fragments for high-throughput sequencing. They are looking for SB sequence integration profiles in noncoding vs. coding DNA. The project involves massive numbers of DNA sequences. The researchers use MSI resources to interpret the data and, hopefully, validate the model. MSI resources such as Galaxy are particularly useful when assembling and interpreting DNA sequence data from Illumina runs.