BLUEPRINT
BLUEPRINT is a large-scale research project receiving close to 30 million euro funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme. 41 leading European universities, research institutes and industry entrepreneurs participate in what is one of the two first so-called high impact research initiatives to receive funding from the EU.
The BLUEPRINT consortium has been formed with the aim to further the understanding of how genes are activated or repressed in both healthy and diseased human cells. BLUEPRINT focuses on distinct types of haematopoietic cells from healthy individuals and on their malignant leukaemic counterparts. It aims to generate at least 100 reference epigenomes and study them to advance and exploit knowledge of the underlying biological processes and mechanisms in health and disease. This aim feeds into the overall objective of the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC). Reference epigenomes will be generated by state-of-the-art technologies from highly purified cells for a comprehensive set of epigenetic marks in accordance with quality standards set by IHEC.
The BLUEPRINT project started October 1, 2011 and will run until April 2016 and is coordinated by Prof. Dr. Henk Stunnenberg, Department of Molecular Biology, Radboud University Nijmegen/ Netherlands.