Federal Project Grant Award Summary

The University of California, San Diego received a $526,805 Project Grant award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) under the Biomedical Research and Research Training program (CFDA 93.859), effective July 1, 2026, through May 31, 2030. The award supports development of episomal single-cell reporter assays designed to enable researchers to measure the activity of hundreds to thousands of regulatory elements with tissue-specific resolution in whole developing embryos. This technology platform will initially focus on enhancers—critical regulatory elements controlling the timing and location of gene expression—and will facilitate high-throughput interrogation of spatiotemporal enhancer activity at scale, addressing a significant technological gap in current genomic research capabilities.

The research deliverables will provide unprecedented tools for studying regulatory element function across developing organisms, moving beyond current single-cell massively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs) that have been limited to tissue culture, embryoid bodies, and isolated tissues. By enabling whole-organism tissue-specific readouts of enhancer activity, this project will support fundamental discovery regarding how tissue-specificity is encoded within genomes and facilitate identification of causal disease variants and their locations of action, ultimately advancing biomedical research capabilities in developmental biology, disease mechanisms, and genetic function interrogation.