The European Commission’s health-research division is contributing €30 million ($41 million) to the new BLUEPRINT epigenome project. More than 50 European researchers from 41 organizations, which will provide an additional €10 million to the project, will generate at least 100 reference epigenomes, making headway in the International Human Epigenome Consortium’s objective of accumulating 1,000 reference epigenomes by 2020. There is currently no collection of high-quality, measurable reference epigenomes researchers can use to evaluate new data. BLUEPRINT will focus on the blood system, using blood from the UK’s national blood bank to create reference epigenomes from 60 different cell types. Each epigenome will be sequenced to provide quantitative data on nine epigenic markers. Reference epigenomes for more than 60 blood-cancer cell types will also be created for comparison. Mice will be used to study how much of the epigenome is inherited. Lower-resolution epigenomes of two blood-cell types from 100 healthy people will be used to measure individual variation.

Source: Nature