Science Alliance Annual Report
2008–2009
Other Ventures
UT-ORNL Joint Seed Money
In FY08, John Biggerstaff, UTK Center for Environmental Biotechnology, and Michael Zemel, UTK nutrition, received Science Alliance funds to expand the work of an ORNL Seed Money project led by Christopher Mann. The two teams are combining fluorescent and holographic microscopy in the same instrument. Their new techniques will eliminate the multiple, time-consuming, and expensive scans now needed to acquire three-dimensional images of biological specimens.
Mann designed the microscope in FY09; Biggerstaff and Zemel will support a graduate research assistant hired to design and test an incubator platform, so scientists can examine live, flowing cells and living mitochondria under conditions similar to those found in nature.
Affymetrix Core Lab
Researchers use DNA microarrays, such as the Affymetrix microarray system, to study the role that genes play in disease, the effectiveness and safety of therapies, and many other biological factors that affect human well-being. Using UTK’s Affymetrix Gene Expression GeneChips, investigators are able to examine distinctions among gene expression in a wide variety of cell types and tissues.
UTK’s Affymetrix Core Facility caters to in-house and local users, but the work is expensive and funds are often limited. In FY09 the Science Alliance and the Office of Research matched funds in an effort to make full use of this valuable, but costly, technology. Pooled with support from various biological departments and colleges, the funds finance an Affymetrix Core Lab Awards Program for proof-of-principle research designed to strengthen grant applications. In FY09, $56,000 was awarded to nine investigators.
Julia Gouffon directs the Affymetrix Core Facility.
Conference Support
UT-ORNL-KBRIN Bioinformatics Summit
The 8th Annual Bioinformatics Summit was held at Fall Creek Falls State Park in Pikeville, Tennessee, March 20-22, 2009. The regional summit has acquired a well-deserved reputation for enhancing collaborative links and integrating multidisciplinary research efforts—resulting in numerous new, cooperative projects in bioinformatics research and education. A total of 202 researchers, educators, and students attended the conference, jointly sponsored by the UT Health Science Center for Integrative and Translational Genomics, the UT Molecular Resource Center, and the Science Alliance.
In addition to Geospiza/Digital World Biology workshops, scientific presentations were organized in three plenary sessions under the headings of medical and translational informatics; systems biology; and next-generation sequencing and epigenetics. Proceedings can be found at http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/10/S7/I1.
In a final review of educational opportunities, Cynthia Peterson, director of the UT-ORNL Graduate School of Genome Science and Technology updated participants on 1) the SCALE-IT program and 2) the one-year-old National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS), a one-of-a-kind institute at UTK. NIMBioS is the result of a $16 million NSF award that will draw more than 600 national and international researchers each year to participate in working groups, workshops, and conferences. See www.nimbios.org. The 2010 Bioinformatics Summit will rotate back to Lake Barkley State Park in western Kentucky in the spring. Areas of interest are expected to focus on the use of next-generation sequencing technologies in research laboratories, clinical informatics, and integrative systems biology.