 Summer 2008 |
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Cover story:
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Systems Biology — In Brief
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DEFINING THE IBSI
“The key words in the name of the Integrative BioSystems Institute are ‘integrative’ and ‘systems.’ Many advances in the life sciences today require an integration of what have previously been traditional disciplines, such as biology, computing and engineering. The disciplines provide strong foundations of knowledge and discovery, but the maximum benefits occur when these are integrated to study systems. Creating the Integrative BioSystems Institute is an organizational method of achieving this integration at Georgia Tech.” – Don Giddens, dean of the College of Engineering, the Lawrence L. Gellerstedt Jr. Chair in Bioengineering and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar
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FRONTIERS IN MULTI-SCALE SYSTEMS BIOLOGY CONFERENCE
Georgia Tech’s new Integrative BioSystems Institute (IBSI) (www.ibsi.gatech.edu) will officially be presented to the public at the Frontiers in Multi-Scale Systems Biology conference Oct. 18-21, 2008, in Atlanta, Georgia. This conference will highlight topics of integrative systems biology including genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, molecular inventories and databases, modeling and simulation, high-performance computing, enabling experimental and computational technologies, and applications in cancer, neuroscience and the environment.
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RNA FOLDING
Christine Heitsch, an assistant professor in the School of Mathematics, is collaborating with School of Biology professor Steve Harvey and College of Computing professor David Bader to understand how ribonucleic acid (RNA) folds in two and three dimensions and how structural information is encoded in large RNA viral genomes. Because current prediction methods cannot reliably and efficiently treat these lengthy sequences, the researchers are developing novel combinatorial and computational approaches to the analysis, prediction and design of viral RNA secondary structures. “Once we know how things fold, we can design drugs to dock at the right places and design a sequence to fold into a specific shape,” says Bader. |
ENVIRONMENTAL AND HEALTH SYSTEMS ARE SIMILAR
“Modeling of biological systems of human health and of ecology are not very different. If ecologists draw a community interaction web showing connections among predators and prey, competitors, or host and pathogens and then remove the labels, it will look like a network of protein interactions to the human health biologists. The complexity of interactions and the mandate for considering the system instead of just the parts are similar for both molecular/biomedical and environmental scientists.” – Mark Hay, the Harry and Linda Teasley Chair in Environmental Biology in the Georgia Tech School of Biology |
MODELING NEUROLOGICAL DISORDERS
Eberhard Voit, the David D. Flanagan Chair in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, postdoctoral fellow Zhen Qi and Gary Miller, an associate professor in Emory’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, are developing a mathematical model of the dopamine network. They hope to use it to better understand how genetic, environmental and pharmacological factors alter how dopamine functions in healthy neurotransmission and in neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia. The researchers plan to use the model in conjunction with biological and clinical studies conducted at Emory University to screen novel therapeutics aimed at altering dopamine function and decreasing the symptoms of both disorders. This interdisciplinary research is being funded by the Woodruff Health Sciences Center’s Predictive Health Initiative at Emory University. . |
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JOINT RESEARCH PROPOSALS AND GRADUATE STUDENTS
The Integrative BioSystems Institute (IBSI) has established a collaborative graduate student fellowship program and a pilot research program. The fellowship program promotes new collaborations between faculty members at Georgia Tech by funding a graduate student to be supervised by two faculty members from different disciplines. The research program supports pilot research projects that combine in a new way the expertise of at least two faculty members in different units within Georgia Tech. The typical award is about $30,000 for one year, with the possibility of extension.
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Last updated: Oct. 9, 2008