Genomics & Computational Biology: an REU Site

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Hands-on research in Genomics and Computational Biology will bring 10 participants recruited nationally from underrepresented groups to UGA, where they will interact with an established interdisciplinary team working on identifying biological circuits for fundamental processes and validating these biological circuits by fitting them to genomics data. Since the discovery of DNA as the genetic material 60 years ago, biologists have been taking apart living systems on a finer and finer scale until we have been able to determine the complete genetic blueprint of many organisms. The challenge of the new millennium is "reassembling the pieces", i.e., moving from genomes to life. One approach to reassembling the pieces is to borrow a metaphor from computer science: the entire chemical reaction network describing what a cell does is a biological circuit. The theme for this genomics and computational biology program is "computing life", i.e., identifying biological circuits for fundamental processes like carbon metabolism and validating these biological circuits by fitting them to genomics data describing what the cell is doing (i.e., RNA and protein profiling data) (PNAS 99: 16904-16909 (2002)). For more information contact lindalee@uga.edu or visit http://gene.genetics.uga.edu/stc. This site is supported by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program