From the NURSA Consortium Members
To the nuclear receptor and coregulator scientific community,
On behalf of its members, we would like to extend to you a warm welcome to the Nuclear Receptor Signaling Atlas (NURSA), a trans-NIH consortium organized in August 2002 and currently in its second phase (2007-2012) supported by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive & Kidney diseases (NIDDK), National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).
NURSA's mission is to further the objectives of the nuclear receptor and coregulator signaling scientific community in the key areas of research and education.
Research
NURSA's research activities are focussed in three major areas
1. Primary Datasets show all datasets
NURSA's mandate from the funding institutes is to generate large, discovery-driven datasets in two broad research Strands: Genomics and Proteomics.
Genomics Strand
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| Ronald Evans |
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David Mangelsdorf |
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Mitch Lazar |
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David Moore |
| Salk Institute |
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UT Southwestern |
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U. of Pennsylvania |
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Baylor College of Medicine | The mission of the NURSA Genomics Strand is to catalog expression of nuclear receptors and coregulators in health and disease, and to carry out large scale microarray analyis of specific nuclear receptor target genes.
Proteomics Strand
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| Bert O'Malley |
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Christopher Glass |
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Jun Qin |
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Ming-Jer Tsai |
| Baylor College of Medicine |
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UC San Diego |
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Baylor College of Medicine |
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| Rakesh Kumar |
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| George Washington University Medical Center |
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The mission of the NURSA Proteomics Strand is to define nuclear receptor and coregulator functional interactomes in native cells.
2. Bioinformatics
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| Neil McKenna |
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Rainer Lanz |
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David Steffen |
| Baylor College of Medicine |
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Baylor College of Medicine |
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Baylor College of Medicine |
To support the primary datasets generated by the Research Strands, the Bioinformatics Resource is developing custom browsing and data analysis interfaces as well as assembling a wealth of public data into which these datasets are integrated in our Molecule Pages.
3. Community interactions
NURSA's success relies on it being an integral part of the research community. To this end we are forging community interactions in three key areas:
Open Access journal
In an effort to involve the community in the development of the NURSA website as a common resource, the Bioinformatics Resource has also developed its own MEDLINE-indexed journal, Nuclear Receptor Signaling (NRS). NRS is intended to complement existing primary research journals in the field to provide a forum for review, perspective and methods articles.
Alliance with The Endocrine Society
In a unique partnership with The Endocrine Society, NURSA has enhanced selected Molecular Endocrinology articles by providing readers of nuclear receptor/coregulator-related articles with one-click access to contextual information on molecules of interest. Reciprocally, our Molecule Pages link back to selected Molecular Endocrinology articles, providing a comprehensive catalog of high quality research articles on a given molecule.
Nuclear receptor ligand database
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| NURSA is also partnering with major pharmaceutical companies to bring to the community a comprehensive and enduring database of nuclear receptor ligands.
Education
NURSA's website is a comprehensive educational resource for teachers, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students in the field of nuclear receptor and coregulator signaling. Firstly, the NURSA Molecule Pages provide focused, composite summaries of the biology and mechanism of nuclear receptors (example: ERα), coregulators (example: SRC-3)and ligands (example: 17β-estradiol), with links to both internal NURSA resources, as well as to important complementary generic and niche biological databases. Secondly, NURSA's MEDLINE-indexed journal, Nuclear Receptor Signaling, is a forum for extensive, comprehehsive reviews of individual molecules or molecule families, solicited from domain experts, as well as current techniques in the field. Finally, NURSA's blog, Signals, provides daily summaries from selected meetings and conferences in the field, affording studentsm, fellows and faculty unable to attend a chance to catch up on the latest research. All this is made available free of charge, with unrestricted access, to ensure the advancement of education in the field.
We anticipate that with the help and support of the community, NURSA can build on its efforts in the first Phase to develop into a valuable service to the nuclear receptor research community. We encourage you to take some time to browse the site and find out more about the people who make up the Atlas, and to review and critique the informational resources within. To keep up with updates and new content on the site, please sign up for our regular e-mail newsletter. |
