[PRESS RELEASE 2012-10-05] Joakim Lundeberg and colleagues Jonas Frisén and Patrik Ståhl have been granted SEK 16.6 million from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to study the brain. They have developed a new method that combines gene expression data from sequencing and tissue localization from microscope imaging. By this method Joakim Lundeberg at the Royal Institute of Technology and Jonas Frisén and Patrik Ståhl at Karolinska Institutet will perform a complete mapping of which genes in the brain that are active and where in the tissue they are expressed.

This will lead to a better understanding of brain function and hopefully also to a better understanding of brain diseases, such as brain cancer. Potentially this can even become a diagnostic tool when sequencing costs are decreased.

The project is carried out in the Genomics platform at the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab), which is among the major sequencing sites in Europe.

‘We moved to SciLifeLab two years ago and the physical location of my group at SciLifeLab has had a very positive impact on the work we are doing’, says Professor Joakim Lundeberg, head of the division of Gene Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and Scientific Director of the Genomics platform at Science for Life Laboratory. ‘The closeness to Karolinska Institutet and other research groups at SciLifeLab has changed the way we do research. We now work more and more in interdisciplinary projects and I am taking part in very interesting close to patient projects such as this one’, says Joakim Lundeberg.

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