KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) – The McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis will receive $60 million to study the genetic factors of several common diseases.

The National Institutes of Health announced Thursday that the institute is one of four organizations receiving a total of $240 million as part of a new Centers for Common Disease Genomics network.

The goal is to discover how differences in DNA contribute to the risk of disease.

The universities will sequence the complete DNA, or genome, of 150,000 to 200,000 people with diseases such as diabetes, stroke and epilepsy. Many of the research subjects will be blacks and people from different ethnic backgrounds.

The other organizations in the project are the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Baylor College of Medicine and the New York Genome Center.