ROCHESTER — The Mayo Clinic in Rochester has been chosen to participate in a set of federal research projects on brain disorders.

The Star Tribune reports the Minnesota clinic will get nearly $3.4 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health to study frontotemperal degeneration, a fatal brain disease. Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, will get about $1.3 million to study a gene related to that disease and other disorders such as ALS. The grants will fund the first year of the five-year projects.

The research is intended to improve scientists’ understanding of diseases that kill cells in brain areas that control executive functioning, speech and memory. Rochester researchers will set up a registry of 300 patients and their relatives with genetic mutations associated with frontotemperal degeneration to determine the likelihood of developing symptoms.