Building on the successes of the Human Genome Project, DOE has initiated an ambitious program to achieve the most far-reaching of all biological goals: a fundamental, comprehensive, and systematic understanding of life.

DOE's Genomes to Life program will make important contributions in the quest to venture beyond characterizing such individual life components as genes and other DNA sequences toward a more comprehensive, integrated view of biology at a whole-systems level. The DOE offices of Biological and Environmental Research and Advanced Scientific Computing Research have formed a strategic alliance to meet this grand challenge.

The plan for the 10-year program is to use DNA sequences from microbes and higher organisms, including humans, as starting points for systematically tackling questions about the essential processes of living systems. Advanced technological and computational resources will help to identify and understand the underlying mechanisms that enable organisms to develop, survive, carry out their normal functions, and reproduce under myriad environmental conditions.

This approach ultimately will foster an integrated and predictive understanding of biological systems and offer insights into how both microbial and human cells respond to environmental changes. The applications of this level of knowledge will be extraordinary and will help DOE fulfill its broad missions in energy, environmental remediation, and the protection of human health.

Specific GTL goals are to

• identify the protein machines that carry out critical life functions,
• characterize the gene regulatory networks that control these machines,
• explore the functional repertoire of complex microbial communities in their natural environments to provide a foundation for understanding and using their remarkably diverse capabilities to address DOE missions, and
• develop the computational capabilities to integrate and understand these data and begin to model complex biological systems.