UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA AT OMAHA - BIOLOGY AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. UNO biology has three INBRE associates, William Tapprich, Elaine Lahue and Donald Rowen. Dr. Tapprich administers the grant. Drs. Tapprich and Rowen are members of the infectious disease theme and Dr. Lahue is a member of the cell signaling theme. All associates have submitted manuscripts to international journals and all have had their manuscripts accepted for publication. Dr. Tapprich has two publications in press, one in Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology and one in Journal of Virology. Dr. Rowen has a publication accepted in Microbiology. Dr. Lahue has a publication accepted in Yeast. All of the associates are also presenting their work at national and international meetings. There are now six BRIN scholars in UNO biology, Dan Reimer, Zachary Meyer, Joel Rivas, Kara Gordon, Ben Hanzel, and Megan Nelson. The first four will be graduating in May 2005. Dan and Zach have been accepted into medical school at UNMC, Joel is still undecided about his future plans and Kara will work for a year as a research technician before pursuing a Ph.D. All of the current scholars have been active in attending and presenting their research work at national and international meetings. Kara and Zach were recipients of the departmental awards for outstanding major and Kara received this year's award as the outstanding undergraduate at UNO. Three new scholars have been selected for the coming year, Marcus Finch, Tess Eidem and Mona Sorouri. All will begin summer projects at UNMC. Funds made available from the INBRE grant enabled us to establish a DNA sequencing facility and a quantitative real time PCR facility in the department. Supply and travel funds from the INBRE grant are invaluable in maintaining our research programs and have led directly to the publications that will appear this year. The computer science department at UNO continues to develop significantly in the area of Bioinformatics. The Bioinformatics activities are continuing to grow with the contribution of five faculty members (including four INBRE associates), ten graduate students and twenty undergraduate students in the newly developed Bioinformatics programs (including five BRIN scholars). The four INBRE associates (Hesham Ali, Zhengxin Chen, Parvathi Chundi and Mark Pauley) have been very active in leading research and educational activities in Bioinformatics. In addition to the four associates, another computer science faculty member, Heifeng Guo, has shown interest and has conducted research in the field. The research output of the group has been significant, with results presented in several professional meetings and published in three journals and many referred conference proceedings. They have been supervising a number of graduate students including five doctoral students. Additionally, three new courses in Bioinformatics were developed and offered the last two semesters. Also, a new Bioinformatics researcher, Guoqing Liu, will be joining UNO this summer on a joint appointment between the departments of Computer Science and Biology, The two 2004 BRIN (Nicholas Palermo and Sarfraz Chandio) Scholars continued to work on projects related to the ones conducted last summer. The results of the projects were presented in several regional events as well as in two international conferences. This summer, both scholars will continue their activities at the same research labs they joined last summer. Three new BRIN Scholars were selected from seven applicants and will join research labs this coming summer. All three scholars are among the 20 students on the new degree in Bioinformatics offered at UNO. The new degree has been attracting many outstanding students and is expected to grow rapidly in the next couple of years. The computer science department continues to house a significant computational facility that was developed by funds from an earlier round of the BRIN grant and an NSF EPSCoR infrastructure grant. The cluster computing facility serves all research and educational needs of the Bioinformatics students and faculty. Several options are currently been investigated to upgrade and maintain the facilities.