Information on the research interests and links to all BCB faculty member's webpages can be found on our website at: http://www.bcb.iastate.edu/faculty/research.html.

You might also like to visit the website for the Laurence H. Baker Center for Bioinformatics and Biological Statistics at ISU. From June 20 to August 6, they held a Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Summer Institute (BCBSI) which offered participants opportunities to be involved with BCB faculty members on research projects. Several of these research projects for the participants are described on their site at: http://www.bioinformatics.iastate.edu/BBSI/research_projects_2005.html.

Here are the faculty who have indicated they would like to take rotating students in Fall, 2005 and Spring, 2006:

Amy Andreotti  Biochemistry, Biophysics & Molecular Biology

• Dr. Andreotti's research - Interested in issues of protein structure and molecular recognition. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a primary research tool in the lab and is used to solve protein structures, analyze protein mediated interactions and measure dynamic motions of proteins. All of the information gleaned from structural studies is used to formulate a better understanding of protein function in vivo. (8/14/05)

Adam Bogdanove  Plant Pathology

• Dr. Bogdanove's research - Genomic and proteomic approaches to bacterial plant pathology and plant disease resistance mechanisms, including bacterial genomic sequence analysis and protein profiling, and plant microarray and mutational analyses. He is accepting rotation students, and invites interested students to visit his lab website for information about his research. (7/15/05)

Volker Brendel  Genetics, Development and Cell Biology

• Dr. Brendel's research - Algorithms for gene identification in genomic sequences; sequence alignment methods; plant transposon molecular biology; molecular phylogeny. He is accepting rotation students, and invites interested students to visit his lab website for information about his research. (7/15/05)

Anne Bronikowski  Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology

• Dr. Bronikowski's research - Our research focuses on the evolution of life history variation with an emphasis on the evolution of senescence (the functional decline in biochemical and physiological processes with age). We address fundamental questions in life history evolution using field studies, laboratory experiments (physiological and molecular), and mathematical modeling. Current research focuses on the evolution and ecology of senescence in 1) natural reptile populations; 2) laboratory populations of mice and 3) semi-natural populations of baboons

  Dr. Bronikowski is accepting rotation students, and invites interested students to visit her lab website for information about her research. (7/15/05)

Hui-Hsien Chou  Genetics, Development and Cell Biology and Computer Science

• Dr. Chou's research - Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Artificial Life. He is accepting rotation students, and invites interested students to visit his lab website for information about his research. (7/15/05)

  Here are just two possible rotation projects, among others:

  1. DNA microarray melting temperature calibration. This project focuses on finding the optimal hybridization temperature for rice whole genome arrays designed using my software Picky. It involves wet lab microarray preps, hybs, scanning and data analysis. This is most suitable to students with wet lab background.
  2. Automatic Vect programming rule set creation. Vect is an NIH funded project to create a bioinformatics solution aims at letting nonprogrammers program in Perl. To assist them, we need to design easily pluggable Vect rules that can be selected and connected by users. This is most suitable to students with CS background.

Julie Dickerson  Electrical and Computer Engineering

• Dr. Dickerson's Research - Systems biology and modeling of metabolic networks, analysis of microarray and metabolomic data using pattern recognition methods, and data visualization in virtual reality. She is accepting rotation students, and invites interested students to visit her lab website for information about her research. (8/12/05)

Drena Dobbs  Genetics, Development and Cell Biology

• Dr. Dobbs' Research - Analysis and prediction of macromolecular structure/function relationships; protein-protein, protein-nucleic acid and membrane protein complex interactions. She is accepting rotation students, and invites interested students to visit her lab website for information about her research. (7/15/05)

Karin Dorman  Statistics

• Dr. Dorman's research - I employ mathematical models and computational tools to capture the essential aspects of biological systems. I am interested in the role of pathogen diversity in diseases caused by rapidly evolving organisms (HIV-1, EIAV, HCV), statistical techniques for the detection of recombination or gene conversion, and stochastic models for explaining the uncertainty in biological outcomes, but none of this makes much sense in a two-sentence summary, so please visit me or my homepage to find out more." Visit her lab website for information about her research. (7/15/05)

Oliver Eulenstein  Computer Science

• Dr. Eulenstein's Rotation projects - algorithms that support biologists in their efforts to construct the tree of all species -- the "Tree of Life". He writes, "I am accepting rotation students who are interested in developing, implementing and analyzing algorithms in collaboration with evolutionary biologists. Rotation students should have fundamental algorithmic knowledge (e.g. introductory algorithms course ComS 311). For more information visit our group website.(7/18/05)

Vasant Honavar  Computer Science

• Dr. Honavar's research - Computational approaches to gene identification, protein structure prediction; identification of molecular structure-function relationships; comparative genomics; distributed knowledge networks for bioinformatics. He is accepting rotation students and invites interested students to visit his lab webpage for more information about his research.(7/18/05)

Susan Lamont  Animal Science

• Dr. Lamont's Research -- Discovery of genes and loci controlling traits of biological importance in the chicken, studying variation in both DNA structure (SNPs) and gene expression (microarray and quantitative RT-PCR). Data mining from the newly available complete genome sequence and 2.8-million SNP map of the chicken. She is accepting rotation students for the 2nd and 3rd rotations, and invites interested students to visit her faculty website for information about her research.(7/18/05)

Howard Levine  Mathematics

• Dr. Levine's Research - Mathematical modeling of biological branching processes including angiogenesis, vasculogenesis, neuronal growth, mammary duct development involving cell-cell and intra cellular signal transduction pathways. He is accepting rotation students, and invites interested students to visit his lab website for information about his research. (7/15/05)

Gustavo MacIntosh  Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology

• The MacIntosh lab is interested in understanding the biological roles of plant nucleases. We are currently applying genomic and proteomic approaches to identify and characterize Arabidopsis and rice nucleases. People in the lab also work on cell biology, physiology and biochemistry. Possible rotation projects include (among others): curation of the rice annotation to improve the identification of nucleases; the application of bioinformatics to identify nucleases currently missed by the genome annotation; use of comparative genomics to understand the evolution of nucleic acids metabolism in plants and animals; and others. Anybody interested in these or related projects (I'm open to suggestions) should contact me to arrange a meeting.(7/22/05)

Chris Minion  Veterinary Microbiology and Preventive Medicine

• Dr. Minion's Research - Analysis of genome sequence data; motif signatures; protein structure prediction; gene regulatory regions. He is accepting rotation students, and invites interested students to visit his lab website for information about his research. (7/15/05)

  Current research:

  My laboratory is presently engaged in the use of microarrays to study bacterial pathogenesis. We work with Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae, E. coli O157:H7 and Listeria monocytogenes, and are also working with a pig array to study the host response to mycoplasma and viral infections. Other projects would include protein prediction studies. If a student is interested in microbial pathogenesis, this is a golden opportunity to get some valuable wet lab experience and learn some new exciting techniques. Data mining will be an important part of the overall experience.

Basil Nikolau  Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology

• Functional genomics of metabolism. Research is focused on the discovery of new gene functions using system based approaches; integrating genomics, transcript profiling, proteomics and metabolomics. Several opportunities are available in the group. If you are interested, drop me an email and come to chat. (7/27/05)

Max Rothschild  Animal Science

• Dr. Rothschild's Research - Comparative genomics; analysis of QTL data, discovery of genes controling traits of economic interest in the pig, dog and shrimp. He is accepting rotation students, and invites interested students to visit his lab website for information about his research. (7/18 /05)

Pat Schnable  Agronomy/Genetics, Development and Cell Biology

• Dr. Schnable's Research - Structural and functional genomics; more specifically: gene discovery and analysis, high throughput genome mapping and the analysis of MicroArray data. He is accepting rotation students, and invites interested students to visit his lab website for information about his research. (7/15/05)

Roger Wise  Plant Pathology

• Research in the Wise laboratory is focused on the functional analysis of important agronomic genes in cereal crops. We are actively involved in high-throughput GeneChip studies to analyze the interactions among plants and plant pathogens. Visit his website and these: http://wiselab.org/, http://barleybase.org/, and http://plexdb.org/ to learn more about his research. (7/20/05)

• Dr. Wurtele's Research - Metabolic networking in plants; evolution of biotin-containing enzymes; RNA and protein profiling analyses. She is accepting rotation students, and invites interested students to visit her lab website for information about her research. (7/15/05)

  Three opportunities are available in her group:

  1) Development of the MetNet platform for analysis of the metabolic and regulatory network of Arabidopsis;
  2) Development of MEta!Blast, educational software with a virtual metabolic cell;
  3) Development of a database for combined analysis of metabolomics and genomics data for the medicinal species Echinacea

Edward Yu  Physics and Astronomy

• Dr. Yu's Research - Structural and mechanistic aspects of membrane transport; X-Ray crystallography of membrane proteins; Biophysics. He is accepting rotation students and invites interested students to visit his lab webpage for more information about his research.(8/10/05)