In August, NHGRI published three FOAs that together request applications proposing a five-year pilot effort whose long-term goal is to catalog the molecular and cellular phenotypes resulting from null alleles of genes in human cells. MorPhiC Phase 1 will target 1000 loci for gene knock-outs; explore multiple molecular and cellular assays; develop analyses to help understand the utility of, and requirements for, the data; and distribute the results to the community.

The overall goal of Phase 1 is to reveal and understand the key challenges in scaling up such an effort to the whole genome, including: optimization of mutagenesis; scalability and informativeness of assays; limitations of interpretation–biological or other variability; development of data quality standards and data formats; and exploration of the range of uses for the data, alone and in combination with other genomic data types. This will inform a possible second phase.

  1. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-HG-21-029.html Molecular Phenotypes of Null Alleles in Cells (MorPhiC) Phase 1: Data Production Research and Development Centers (UM1 Clinical trials not allowed)
  2. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-HG-21-030.html Molecular Phenotypes of Null Alleles in Cells (MorPhiC) Phase 1: Data Analysis and Validation Centers (U01 Clinical trials not allowed)
  3. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-HG-21-031.html Molecular Phenotypes of Null Alleles in Cells (MorPhiC) Phase 1: Data Resource and Administrative Coordinating Center (U24 Clinical trials not allowed)

A pre-application community webinar will be held on September 10th; Pre-application webinar:  https://www.genome.gov/event-calendar/MorPhiC-pre-application-webinar

Frequently Asked Questions about the FOA’s will be available on the NHGRI web site referenced.

Email Contact: morphicprogram@nih.gov