Category: News

Congratulations to all of the symposium award winners! Duo Peng won the Outstanding Poster Award, and Ujwal Bagal won the Ying Xu Outstanding Student Paper Award.

IOB Director Jessica Kissinger and IOB and Mathematics assistant professor Juan Gutierriez are part of a malaria research center that was awarded up to $19.4 million by a recent NIH contract.  The malaria host-pathogen interaction center, MaHPIC, will study the systems biology of non-human primate, and human malaria.

Professor will use NSF Award to trace origin of a protein family.

To read more about the NSF award, click HERE for details.

Dr. Natarajan Kannan is a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar, an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the UGA Institute of Bioinformatics.

Celine Hong, PhD candidate in the Institute of Bioinformatics, uses innovative ideas and cutting-edge computational methods to address biological problems related to cancer. One of the main topics in Hong’s research is to find a way to enhance cancer diagnosis by identifying biomarkers that can be used to detect the disease at an early stage. Her first project was to develop a computational method for predicting excreted protein to find non-invasive biomarkers in urine. Using experimental techniques to complement her computational prediction, such as western blots and antibody arrays, her work led to the discovery that a protein called endothelial lipase is greatly suppressed in urine from gastric cancer patients versus control. This non-invasive method of testing shows great promise as a diagnostic tool for other types of cancer and a variety of other diseases. Hong has continued her studies with a focus on finding microRNA biomarkers, as well as studying the apoptosis pathways in cancer cells. She is developing and applying novel computational techniques to make meaningful discoveries in her research.

The poster award winners went to Eric Talevich of Dr. Natarajan Kannan’s lab and Yan Li of Dr. Andeas Handel’s lab.  Congratulations to all!

Congratulations to Dr. Natarajan Kannan for winning the NSF Career Award for his project entitled “Unraveling the Design Principles of Protein Kinases using an Evolutionary Systems Approach.”

The 17th Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics will be held at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington on July 9 – 27, 2012.  See https://bilab.uga.edu/iob/wp-content/uploads/sites/47/2012/03/2012SISGBrochure.pdf for detailed information.

Congratulations to Drs. Anuj Srivastava and Yupeng Wang in successfully defending their PhD dissertation.   Dr. Srivastava will be joining the Jackson Laboratory as a Senior Research Scientist.  Dr. Wang will continue his current work at the Plant Genome Mapping Laboratory as a postdoctoral research fellow.

IOB graduate student Eric Talevich, Biochemistry undergraduate Amar Mirza and IOB Assistant Professor Natarajan Kannan have published a research article in BMC Evolutionary Biology titled:  “Structural and Evolutionary Divergence of Eukaryotic Protein Kinases in Apicomplexa”. The study examines a medically important protein superfamily as it appears in the malaria pathogen and its evolutionary relatives.

Talevich E, Mirza A, Kannan N: Structural and evolutionary divergence of eukaryotic protein kinases  in Apicomplexa. BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011, 11:321

Read more at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/11/321