January 2011

The IGSP Education Office is now accepting applications for the 2011 IGSP and Center for Systems Biology Summer Fellowship program.

Through the 10 week program, students will have the opportunity to engage in research within the IGSP's interdisciplinary environment. Fellows are mentored by faculty and participate in additional scheduled activities, including weekly lunch-lectures with faculty, science career dinners, IGSP seminars, student research discussions, planned social activities and end-of-summer research presentations.

The deadline for application is Friday, February 4th. Full details about the fellowships are available on our web site along with profiles of last summer's undergraduate fellows. Please direct any additional inquiries you may have about the program to IGSP Education Program Coordinator Jessica Crowley.

Nicholas Buchler: The Dynamics of Regulatory Networks in Yeast
Genome Technology profiled Nick Buchler as one of this year's young investigators on the rise.

Difficult Students and Inherited Traits
Ivanhoe's Children's Health Channel features a study by Avshalom Caspi, Terrie Moffitt and colleagues suggesting that the difference between a tougher student and an easier one is partly genetic.

Blood Test for Heart Attack
Research conducted by Geoff Ginsburg and colleagues formed the basis for one of Time Magazine's top 10 medical breakthroughs for the year: a panel of genes coding for blood proteins that may offer early warning of a heart attack.

Secrets of a Common Virus that Can Cause Cancer
Sandeep Dave is a collaborator on a study that reveals a pathway that infected cells use to root out infection with the Epstein-Barr virus, a finding with implications for understanding human responses to cancer-causing viruses generally.

Fast-Growing Plants May Carpet World in Green
LiveScience's Mad Scientist columnist features work by Philip Benfey that suggests a way to make biofuels grasses grow faster.

Everything I'm Made Of, I Put Online
Salon.com published the opening excerpt of Misha Angrist's new book, "Here is a Human Being," published by HarperCollins. Misha's book is also featured in the Nov/Dec issue of Duke Magazine.

US Scientists Get $1M Prize for Childhood Research
ABC News featured Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi's receipt of a $1 million prize in recognition of their decades-long research into childhood development. The award was also featured by the Charlotte Observer.

Equations that Spell Disaster
An article in The Scientist about efforts to pinpoint the causes of complex disease features a 2003 study by Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt that tied a particular variant in the promoter region of 5-HTT to an increased risk of depression. Earlier work by Caspi and Moffitt was also featured in a New Scientist story about the discovery of an "impulsivity gene" in violent offenders.

Planet of the Apes...and Monkeys and Humans
In Time Magazine's Ecocentric blog, Susan Alberts comments on why it's good to be a primate.

Bob Cook-Deegan Talks with Creative Commons
A Creative Commons blogger talks with Bob Cook-Deegan about the issues of privacy, abuse and distrust that stand in the way of genomics and what Creative Commons' role might be in finding solutions.

Gene Expression Divergence Recapitulates the Developmental Hourglass Model
Uwe Ohler is a collaborator on a paper in Nature that presents evidence that natural selection acts to conserve patterns of gene expression during mid-embryogenesis, providing genome-wide insight into the molecular basis of the hourglass pattern of developmental evolution. The work was featured in a Nature News & Views and by Discovery News and USA Today.

Identification of Functional Elements and Regulatory Circuits by Drosophila modENCODE
Dave MacAlpine is one of many authors on a Science paper describing more than 700 data sets designed to comprehensively map transcripts, histone modifications, chromosomal proteins, transcription factors, replication proteins and intermediates and nucleosome properties across a developmental time course in multiple Drosophila cell lines. The work is part of the Drosophila model organism Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (modENCODE) project.

Modeling the Evolution of Regulatory Elements by Simultaneous Detection and Alignment with Phylogenetic Pair HMMs
In PLoS Computational Biology, Uwe Ohler and William Majoros describe a new and flexible framework for modeling binding site evolution in multiple related genomes, based on phylogenetic pair hidden Markov models that explicitly model the gain and loss of binding sites along a phylogeny.

The Alzheimer's Associated 5' Region of the SORL1 Gene Cis Regulates SORL1 Transcript Expression
In Neurobiology of Aging, Ornit Chiba-Falek and Jeanette McCarthy report evidence to suggest that genetic regulation of SORL1 expression plays a role in Alzheimer's disease risk.

Genomic Signatures of Diet-Related Shifts During Human Origins
In a Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences review, Greg Wray and colleagues propose ways in which new technologies can help identify specific genomic adaptations that have resulted in metabolic and morphological differences between humans and non-human primates.

Clinical and Sociodemographic Factors Predict Coping Styles Among Adults with Sickle Cell Disease
In the Journal of the National Medical Association, Charmaine Royal and colleagues identify and characterize the coping styles among adults with sickle cell disease.

Unprecedented Loss of Ammonia Assimilation Capability in a Urease-Encoding Bacterial Mutualist
In BMC Genomics, Lauren Williams and Jennifer Wernegreen reports that a bacterial mutualist of the ant Camponotus vafer is missing glutamine synthetase, a component of the nitrogen recycling pathway.

The Prevalence and Regulation of Antisense Transcripts in Schizosaccharomyces pombe
In PLoS One, Jun Zhu, Kristin Scott and colleagues present evidence that antisense transcription has profound impacts on global gene regulation in S. pombe.

For details and updates on IGSP seminars and events, see the Events Calendar.

A selection of upcoming events:

Tuesday, January 4th
Special Seminar
Elizabeth Grice will give a seminar entitled "Genomic Analysis of Skin Microbiota in Health and Chronic Diabetic Wounds" as part of recruitment for a joint faculty position in the IGSP, Department of Medicine and Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology.

Thursday, January 6th
Genomic and Personalized Medicine Forum
Felix Freuh of Medco Health Solutions will present a case study of warfarin testing, reimbursement and clinical utility.

Monday, January 10th
Cancer Genomics Seminar
Dan George will present.

Monday, January 24th
Computational Biology Seminar
Richard Bonneau from New York Univeristy will present "Learning Regulatory Networks: From Modules to Dynamics."

Tuesday, January 25th
Tuesday Seminar Series
Titia de Lange of The Rockefeller University will present "How Telomeres Solve the End-Protection Problem."

The National Institutes of Health will fund new research into the complex interactions between genetic, biochemical, and environmental factors that are involved in susceptibility and variability of structural birth defects.

The National Institutes of Health has announced a shared instrumentation grant program and encourage applications from groups of NIH-supported investigators to purchase or upgrade a single item of expensive, specialized, commercially available instrumentation or an integrated system that costs at least $100,000.

The National Cancer Institute plans to fund research that will validate new mitochondrial-related cancer biomarkers for early detection, prognosis, risk assessment and response to treatments.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has requested applications for research aimed at identifying ways to detect environmentally-induced mitochondrial dysfunction, which is associated with a number of major diseases.