The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has appointed seven investigators as the first tenants at the institute’s flagship multidisciplinary research campus at Janelia Farm, in Ashburn, Virginia. The $500-million facility, which will eventually host some 300 researchers, is scheduled to open its doors next year.

“These scientists are an exceptional group with diverse backgrounds and training,” said HHMI President and Nobel laureate, Thomas Cech. “They bring extensive experience in biology, computational biology, genetics, mathematics and physics. But more importantly, they all share a deep curiosity about major scientific questions that lie at the boundaries of these disciplines.”

Areas of planned research include brain development; genome structure; image analysis; and behavioral neurobiology. “We have picked big science problems that are not being addressed well in conventional research settings,” said Janelia Farm director Gerry Rubin. The newly appointed group leaders “are all committed to the idea that creativity, collaboration, and the freedom to explore new areas, coupled with generous long-term support, are a winning combination for science.”

HHMI selected this first group of investigators from more than 300 applicants, seeking to entice researchers in chemistry, computer science, engineering, mathematics and physics, as well as biology. Further appointments are expected to be made later this year or early in 2006, for a total of 24 group leaders.

The first seven Janelia Farm group leaders are:

• Dmitri Chklovskii (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York)
• Sean Eddy (HHMI/Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis)
• Nikolaus Grigorieff (HHMI/Brandeis University)
• Eugene Myers (University of California, Berkeley)
• Julie Simpson (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
• Roland Strauss (University of Würzburg, Germany)
• Karel Svoboda (HHMI/Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)

Gene Myers is best known for co-developing BLAST, the ubiquitous gene-matching program; for his informatics contributions to Celera’s assembly of the Drosophila genome in 1999; and the human genome in 2001. At Janelia Farm, Myers will provide computational expertise to process brain image data, with the purpose of building "complete reconstructions, to the level of detail possible, of fly brains and mouse brains. And then we want to use that neuroanatomy to try to understand function."

"There's going to be too much data to be reconstituted manually," he says. "It's going to have to be done by computation."

Another recruit is Sean Eddy, a respected bioinformatician with particular interests in non-coding RNAs, a booming field in genomics research. Eddy will provide bioinformatics expertise to the facility, and hopes to expand his interests into neurobiology.

On the imaging side, Cold Spring Harbor’s Karel Svoboda is an expert in devising new tools to study the rewiring of the brain. "For a new microscope, you come up with an idea, you draw it up in your mind, and then you have to build a prototype. You need a machine shop, you need electronics, and all of a sudden you're out of your depth," says Svoboda. "Finding those kinds of resources is very, very difficult, but it's vital to developing the kind of sophisticated instruments we need." Moving to Janelia Farm is, he says, a “no brainer.”

The only woman in the group is University of Wisconsin-Madison postdoc Julie Simpson, who studies the molecular circuitry of neuronal networks in Drosophila. The breadth of talent and training is warmly welcomed by Rubin, who notes that the group leaders have Ph.Ds “in fields ranging from physics, chemistry, and computer science to biophysics, molecular biology, and genetics.”

Farm Hands
HHMI also announced that Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner (Salk Institute) and Charles Shank, former director of Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will advise on the research program, as well as providing advice to Rubin and Janelia Farm researchers, staying on site a few weeks each year.

HHMI funds more than 300 medical researchers at their host institutions around the country. Janelia Farm – a purpose-built, custom-designed research center scheduled to open in 2006 – is designed to provide an interactive environment for small research groups with a broad spectrum of expertise.

The planners have modeled the facility on the successful organization of two well-known biomedical labs – the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in Cambridge, UK, and AT&T's Bell Laboratories in the US. Many of the new recruits have spent time working at either the LMB or Bell Labs.