NIH Grants Echinobase $4 Million in New Funding

Echinoderms are the sea stars of Veronica Hinman and Charles Ettensohn's genetics research. Through Echinobase, they and collaborators provide researchers access to information and a community to foster research in evolutionary and developmental biology.

"Echinobase is a project I've been working on for several years where we collect all sort of genomic data and put it in a very searchable database," said Hinman, head of Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Biological Sciences and Dr. Frederick A. Schwertz Distinguished Professor of Life Sciences. "Now, somebody can find all this data in one base, and everything is freely accessible."

Echinobase is a repository that provides detailed information on known genomic information about a group of marine animals known echinoderms. Common echinoderms include sea urchins, sea cucumbers and starfish.

Hinman and Ettensohn, professor of biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon, along with Peter Vize, professor of biological sciences at the University of Calgary, created the latest version of Echinobase in 2020. The team received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create the database, and in 2023, they received a $4 million grant to maintain the resource through 2028.

"The new funding will support the work of curators and bioinformaticians who ensure that the knowledgebase is comprehensive and current in the information it provides to the research community," Ettensohn said. "It will also keep Echinobase accessible to the public, through the maintenance of servers and cloud-based storage."

Starfish and humans, along with other vertebrates, share some similarities in their early development, genome organization and gene content. Researchers from all over the world use the database, and Hinman said that the work is an incredible resource and that species model organism databases are crucial to scientific research.

"It's very satisfying to feel that you're really supporting your community," Hinman said.