Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Informatics for FY 2003

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Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Interdisciplinary Informatics are sponsored jointly by the Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Biological Sciences (BIO) to encourage research and training that cross the traditional disciplinary boundaries between them. These fellowships provide opportunities for interdisciplinary research and educational activities in biology and informatics to a wide range of recent doctoral recipients (biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, and others) who seek to conduct research on biological questions using informatics tools and methods. It is expected that the Fellows trained through these fellowships will play an important role in training the future workforce. Postdoctoral training in informatics will permit junior scientists trained in biology, mathematical, chemical, and physical sciences to play key roles in developing new quantitative tools and methods that will advance informatics in biology and other fields. The title of the fellowship's research and training plan is "Using biological informatics to reveal gene silencing domains in Arabidopsis thaliana." Eukaryotic chromosomes are organized into heterochromatin, which stains intensely in histological preparations and associates with low levels of gene expression, and euchromatin, which stains lightly and contains the majority of active genes. Cryptic, non-staining heterochromatin is thought to be distributed throughout the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana, where it may affect expression of nearby genes. By correlating methylation and gene expression data from genomic microarrays with computationally- and experimentally-derived parameters, this research is identifying new heterochromatic domains and investigating their role in regulating gene expression.