Yang Zhang, a project scientist in the Computational Biology Department, received a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) for his project, "Napari-Nucleome: Integrative Multi-Omic Exploration of the Cell Nucleus."

Awarded to 35 developers, the $25,000 grant aims to improve a community-driven Python platform for browsing, annotating and analyzing large multidimensional images called napari.

Genome-mapping techniques have created incredible amounts of data for researchers to analyze, but gaps remain in the effective use of the relationships between different data. Zhang's project will, for the first time, allow napari users to perform interactive exploration of multimodal datasets to help bridge that gap.    

"This plugin represents an extension of our recent work, Nucleome Browser, and helps drive the development of the napari ecosystem of plugins. Researchers can use this tool to interactively explore imaging data displayed in napari side-by-side with multi-omics and 3D genome structure models displayed in Nucleome Browser," said Zhang. "The ultimate goal is to help researchers have a more complete view of how chromatin is organized inside the cell nucleus."  

For more information about the award, visit the CZI website.