Please help us in congratulating Jeremy Ash (Bioinformatics, Ph.D.)who recently won second place in the competitive Nvidia ACS COMP poster contest. His work is relevant for the development of extremely predictive QSAR models needed for lead optimization, which is of great interest to pharmaceutical companies for modeling technology. Congratulations, Jeremy!!
The Bioinformatics Research Center will be hosting weekly Industry and Government partners in informal talks aimed at partnership, collaboration, and the sharing of ideas. Each Monday at 11:30am, we will welcome a different partner to speak to our Graduate students, faculty and research staff. Talks last roughly 30 minutes, and are followed by pizza. Schedule is as follows:
Drs. Pierce (Chemistry), Fourches (Chemistry, BRC), and Elfenbein (CVM) have received a grant from the Research and Innovation Funding (RISF) program. Their research project is entitled “Development of Novel Therapeutics to Modulate Bacterial Biofilms” and will be conducted in 2016.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has awarded a 3-year grant to fund a collaboration between Oregon State University (Robert Tanguay, Jane La Du, Mike Simonich, Chris Sullivan) and North Carolina State University (David Reif) entitled “System Toxicological Approaches to Define Flame Retardant Adverse Outcome Pathways”.
From the EPA webpage:
A team of researchers from Oregon State University and North Carolina State University proposes to conduct the first comprehensive in vivo,structure-activity based toxicity studies of flame retardant chemicals (FRCs), including FRCs that EPA has phased out, FRCs that companies manufacture now, and FRCs that companies have proposed as replacements. (They) will test the hypothesis that the toxicity of FRCs will be highly dependent on their chemical structure.
The Bioinformatics Research Center was pleased to present the 2015 C. Clark Cockerham Guest Lecture, with guest speaker, Dr. Nancy Cox of Vanderbilt University. The title of her lecture was, ““New Kinds of Data Integration: Genome x Transcriptome x Electronic Medical Records”. The Bioinformatics Research Center would like to thank all those who attended and especially Dr. Nancy Cox for her time and efforts.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has awarded a $6 million grant to fund a multi-institutional collaboration between the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences and the Bioinformatics Research Center at NCSU. investigating the effects of environmental toxicants on human health with a focus on the potential adverse effects on the heart. The investigators will study the effect of environmental chemicals on cultures of cells that have been coaxed into behaving like heart muscle, even to the point of beating with a regular rhythm. Dr. Fred Wright, the principal investigator for the NCSU site, says “the ability to systematically investigate cardiac toxicity in this manner opens up the study of inter-individual variability in toxicity testing, in a way that was not possible before.” Other investigators at NCSU include Associate Professor David Reif and Research Assistant Professor Yi-Hui Zhou.
Image credit: Cellular Dynamics
Link: http://today.tamu.edu/2015/06/29/epa-awards-texas-am-6-million-for-cardiac-health-related-study/
New research from North Carolina State University and Reed College shows that when fruit flies are attacked by parasites or bacteria they respond by producing offspring with greater genetic variability. This extra genetic variability may give the offspring an increased chance of survival when faced with the same pathogens. These findings demonstrate that parents may purposefully alter the genotypes of their offspring.
Image credit: Dahlia Nielsen, NCSU
Link: https://news.ncsu.edu/2015/08/singh-fruit-fly/
BRC faculty member Yi-Hui Zhou, Research Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, has received a two-year R21 award from the National Human Genome Research Institute to develop new methods to analyze genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Existing methods for genetic association mapping primarily use parametric statistical assumptions. Explains Dr. Zhou, “standard methods can fail, even for large sample sizes, at the extreme significance thresholds required when testing millions of genetic markers.” An alternative approach uses permutation, a kind of data shuffling that provides accurate results, but is computationally intensive. The grant proposes to develop new mathematical approximations to permutation, in order to provide fast and accurate testing with greatly reduced computational burden.
David Reif was a member of the Working Group that drew experts from 13 countries to a meeting in Lyon, France in order to evaluate the carcinogenicity of the the insecticides gamma-hexachlorocyclohexane (lindane) and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and the herbicide 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D).
Summaries of the final evaluations are available in the official press release and Lancet Oncology article. The detailed assessments will be published as Volume 113 of the IARC Monographs.