10/03/2026
A major milestone for open science is taking shape at the R. Ken Coit College of Pharmacy, led by Dr. Travis Wheeler. The Coit College of Pharmacy has announced a $1.8 million gift from the Genetic Information Research Institute to support the merger of Repbase and Dfam, two foundational resources for transposable element research, into a single, fully open-access framework. Wheeler, an associate professor at the College, has been working toward this vision since 2011, alongside collaborators including A***n Smit and Robert Hubley. His goal was straightforward but ambitious: make a foundational genomic resource freely available to researchers everywhere. Now, Repbase’s decades of expert curation and Dfam’s open, scalable infrastructure are coming together to create an even more powerful resource for the scientific community.
The significance reaches far beyond databases, as transposable elements are central to understanding evolution, gene innovation, cancer, aging and the biology of genomes. Dfam already contains transposable-element information for more than 6,000 species, and the resource continues to grow. The integration will also bring new curation tools, computational methods, workshops and training opportunities to researchers around the world. For Wheeler, this is the culmination of more than a decade of work to make critical genomic knowledge accessible without fees or restrictions. As he put it, “Thirty years of expert knowledge has been sitting behind a paywall, and now it won't be,” marking an important new chapter for open genomic science.
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