DARPA: Defense Sciences Office (DSO)– Discovering Unknome Function (DUF)/ Advanced Research Concepts (ARC)- abstracts

ARC Opportunities are designed to allow an individual researcher the opportunity and time to focus on nascent, paradigm-shifting ideas for national security applications.

Despite over 20 years of extensive genome function annotation, certain genes have been neglected. Annotating these genes is technically challenging and often goes unfunded. The result is a bias in biological research toward previously studied genes, leaving a large area of fundamental research ripe for scientific discovery.

Cellular processes are inherently complex due to the large number of molecules and interactions, which are often nonlinear and occur at drastically different spatiotemporal scales that can span orders of magnitude. Generating cellular datasets for gene function discovery is thus laborious and time-consuming; this leads to integrated experimental datasets from various strains, cellularstates, and laboratory conditions3. Consequently, efforts to build useful predictive models of genotype-phenotype relationships are hindered by batch effects in training datasets and unannotated genes that still affect cell phenotype.

The DUF ARC Opportunity is soliciting ideas to explore the question: Can high-throughput

workflows be developed to annotate the unknown function of (non)coding genes?

Funding: up to $300,000 for 12 months.

https://sam.gov/opp/4e86ad556e184738b83ebb1c0e0bf6aa/view