Panetta Announces National Human Genome Research Institute Grant Awarded to University of California, Santa Cruz

SALINAS, CA – Today, Congressman Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) announced that the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) received a federal grant totaling $819,502 from the National Human Genome Research Institute. The funds will be used for a project called "Dockstore," a platform for sharing tools & workflows on the Cloud Commons.

"Emerging technologies are making it easier and easier for the scientific community to innovate and share their findings," said Congressman Panetta. "I am proud that with this federal investment, UCSC will be able to build on their current scientific progress in biomedicine and help other research institutions to do the same."

"The analysis of large swaths of healthcare and high-throughput data is increasingly essential to making discoveries in biomedicine," said Benedict Paten, a professor in the Biomolecular Engineering Department at UCSC. "Such analyses, often involving sophisticated algorithms and involving significant amounts of computation, are often quite complex. Nevertheless, to ensure discoveries from this scientific work are reproducible we need to be able to package these analyses, making them findable, sharable and accessible digital artifacts that can be reused in further study by the scientific community. This in essence is what dockstore.org is designed to do. The funding provided will allow us to grow dockstore.org into a platform in which scientific analyses can be openly shared and rerun with just a few clicks."