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sector_ico_Health_trans Human Health

Splice-Variant Profiling of Voltage-Gated Calcium Channels- Implications for Human Genetic Disorders

SOF116
  • Project Leaders: Terrance Snutch
  • Institutions: University of British Columbia (UBC)
  • Budget: $200000
  • Program/Competition: Strategic Opportunities Fund
  • Genome Centre(s): Genome British Columbia
  • Status: Closed

Calcium channels are an important target for the therapeutic treatment of several human disorders including migraine, epilepsy, chronic pain, mood disorders, heart disease and certain types of cancer.  This project focused on generating new cost-effective and specific drug screening tools for calcium channels.  Researchers combined existing expertise in calcium channel physiology with the latest high-throughput gene sequencing techniques to identify the exact nature of calcium channel variants relevant to certain disease models. A novel and extremely valuable technique was developed that will allow individual labs to perform rapid and comprehensive analysis of splice variation on difficult low abundance gene specific transcript populations, not previously possible using current RNASeq methods.