Our group has a strong background in Genomics, and has participated over the past years in several genome projects carried out in Brazil, including the Xylella fastidiosa (Simpson et al. 2000) and the Human Cancer Genome Projects (Camargo et al. 2001 and Brentani et al. 2003). We have initially applied our knowledge to identify novel human genes located on chromosomes 22 (De Souza et al. 2000) and 21 (Camargo et al. 2002) and at the Hereditary Prostate Cancer Locus 1 (HPC1) at 1q25 (Silva et al. 2003). We have also coordinated a large collaborative project, known as the Transcript Finishing Initiative, aimed to identify and validate the structure of thousands of new human genes (TFI consortium, 2004). We are now concentrating our efforts on the identification and characterization of tumor-specific genomic alterations related to tumor formation and progression. This is being achieved using both computational and experimental approaches.
