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The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute in Blacksburg will be the lead institution on a $10.3 million federal project to establish a database of information on infectious diseases that will be accessible to researchers worldwide.

Dubbed the Bioinformatics Resource Center, or BRC, the database will feature high-quality data and computational tools to help researchers store, view, display, query and analyze genetic data and other information about infectious diseases. The VBI-led group will focus on brucella, which causes brucellosis in livestock and humans; hepatitis A; the rabies virus; a group of viruses that caused many of the recent gastrointestinal outbreaks on cruise ships; and the viruses that cause Rocky Mountain spotted fever and typhus.

Researchers from Virginia Tech's computer science department, the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, Loyola University Medical School and the University of Maryland will also participate in the project, which is funded by a division of the National Institutes of Health.

"This NIH award highlights the importance of multiple-university collaborations in the rapidly developing fields of systems biology and bioinformatics," Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said in a statement announcing the contract. "The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech has established itself as a leading center for advanced research."

Steger and other Tech administrators are looking to VBI - a state institute based at Virginia Tech - to play a key role in the university's ambitious campaign to become a Top 30 research institution by decade's end. Since its establishment in 2000, VBI researchers have been awarded nearly $42 million in external research funding.

Bioinformatics is the science of using supercomputers to better understand molecular, cellular and environmental interactions.

The five-year, $10.3 million project is one of the largest NIH contracts ever received by Virginia Tech. A contract is different from a federal grant in that the government is paying the institution to perform a certain task rather than funding a research program.

The NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded similar contracts on different infectious diseases to five other groups nationwide, including ones led by the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Notre Dame.

"Because of the enormous scope of this, you need to have subject-matter experts on each of these organisms," said Blanche O'Neill, scientific coordinator for the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute.

Working with VBI's Core Computational Facility, the group will make the database available to researchers through the Web via a browser-accessible system or tools contained in another federally funded VBI project known as ToolBus/PathPort.