HUAIJUN ZHOU TO PRESENT THESIS SEMINAR ON NOVEMBER 24 (11-19-03)
BCB MS student Huaijun Zhou (GDCB Department, co-major professors Xun Gu and Susan Lamont) will present his thesis seminar, Statistical analysis of functional divergence in gene families, at 9 am Monday, November 24, in 2255 Kildee. All are invited to attend.

MICHAEL SMILEY WILL PRESENT THIS WEEK'S BCB FACULTY SEMINAR (11-18-03)
Michael Smiley (Mathematics), will present the BCB Faculty Seminar on Friday, November 21. Smiley's seminar will begin at 12:10 pm in E164 Lagomarcino and is open to the public.

CIZHONG JIANG WILL PRESENT THESIS SEMINAR NOVEMBER 14 (11-12-03)
BCB student Cizhong Jiang (Interdepartmental Genetics co-major; Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology; major professors Thomas Peterson and Xun Gu) will present his PhD thesis seminar at 2 pm this Friday, November 14, in 1102 Molecular Biology. His seminar, titled Computational and molecular analysis of Myb gene family, is open to the ISU bioinformatics community.

ADRIAN SANNIER WILL PRESENT THIS WEEK'S BCB FACULTY SEMINAR (11-12-03)
Adrian Sannier (Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering), will present Interacting with macromolecules in C6 virtual reality cave at the BCB Faculty Seminar on Friday, November 14. The seminar will begin at 12:10 pm in E164 Lagomarcino and is open to the public.

FALL 2003 PRESIDENTIAL UNIVERSITY LECTURE NOVEMBER 13 (11-13-03)
Dr. Max Rothschild, Charles F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor in Agriculture, will present the Fall 2003 Presidential University Lecture, From a Sow's Ear to a Silk Purse: The Promise of Genomics, at 8 pm Thursday, November 13, in the Memorial Union Sun Room. A reception and student poster display will precede the lecture at 7 pm in the South Ballroom.

MGET ANNOUNCES EQUIPMENT GRANT COMPETITION (11-7-03)
The Multi-Disciplinary Graduate Education and Training (MGET) Program: “Graduate Training in Computational Biology for Animal Agriculture” has announced a call for proposals for an Equipment Funding Opportunity:

Funds for equipment to enhance graduate training in computational biology are available from the MGET-CBAA training grant. This Call for Proposals is intended to provide a mechanism to identify the best use of these funds for the MGET community. Funding for such equipment, as well as any innovative use of these funds that advances Computational Biology resources and opportunities at ISU, will be considered. Priority will be given to projects that are expected to benefit as many members of MGET as possible, as well as contribute to resources for Computational Biology on campus. Proposals with matching funds will also be given a higher priority. Of highest priority will be proposals that contribute to current needs and that also increase the chances for future external funding in the areas of animal and/or microbial genomics and Computational Biology. Thus it is expected that faculty members will be cognizant of the national priorities in these areas.

GARRY THESIS SEMINAR SET FOR NOVEMBER 12 (11-7-03)
IGERT fellow Aspen Garry (EEB major; Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology; co-major professors Gavin Naylor and Dean Adams) will present her MS thesis seminar at 10 am Wednesday, November 12, in 333 Science II. Her seminar title will be Geometric morphometric analysis of shark teeth of the genus Rhizoprionodon: The modern, the ancient, and the hypothetical. Modern tooth shape analysis and test of ancestor prediction methods by comparison to fossil shapes. The ISU bioinformatics community is invited to attend.

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH ON MAIZE GENOME GETS RESULTS (11-6-03)
BCB PhD student Scott Emrich (Aluru/Brendel/Schnable) will present one of six invited papers in the bioinformatics workshop at the International Plant and Animal Genome conference in San Diego this January. Scott's presentation, entitled A Strategy for Assembling the Maize Genome, is an outgrowth of collaborative maize genome research undertaken by the labs of Srinivas Aluru, Dan Ashlock and Pat Schnable. Also working on the project are BCB PhD major Ling Guo (Schnable/Ashlock) and BCB minor Yan Fu (Genetics PhD major, Schnable).

Pat Schnable provides an update of their success, and an invitation to BLAST away!

The Consortium for Maize Genomics and other groups have deposited hundred of thousands of maize genomic sequences in Genbank. I am very pleased to announce the release of an assembly of over 730,000 of these sequences (127 MB). This assembly (version 2.3.1) contains 94,000 contigs (MAGIs) with an average length of 1.3 kb and 4 GSSs/contig. It was generated by a collaborative research group that includes members of the Aluru, Ashlock and Schnable labs at Iowa State University using funding from NSF and ISU.

You may access the assembly at http://www.plantgenomics.iastate.edu/maize. This site allows you to BLAST your favorite gene or cDNA against the assembled contigs of GSSs.

We've been very pleased with the coverage; almost all genes that we've BLASTED detect one or more substantial segments of assembled genomic sequence. We therefore decided to make this assembly immediately available to the community even though our current Maize Genome Assembly website is still a "bare bones" operation. Because we plan to substantially enhance this site over the next several months (and generate a new and improved assembly), we welcome your comments, suggestions and feedback.

Finally, I'd like to invite you to attend a talk on our assembly pipeline that will be presented by graduate student Scott Emrich January 12th at the PAG meeting.

KARIN DORMAN WILL PRESENT THIS WEEK'S BCB FACULTY SEMINAR (11-4-03)
Karin Dorman (Statistics and GDCB), will present Mathematical Modeling in Biology: Applications to Virus Evolution at the BCB Faculty Seminar on Friday, November 7. The seminar, which will begin at 12:10 pm in E164 Lagomarcino, is open to the public.

BCB STUDENTS MADE GREAT SHOWING IN COMPUTER SYMPOSIUM POSTER COMPETITION (11-3-03)
From BCB Chair Vasant Honavar:

Congratulations to BCB students Scott Emrich and Changhui Yan on bagging two of the three awards for best student posters in the Computing Applications Category in the John Vincent Atanasoff Symposium on Advanced Computing. Congratulations to Computer Science students Doina Caragea and Adrian Silvescu (also BCB minors) for bagging one of the three awards in the Computing Research category for their work on learning from heterogeneous distributed information sources which was motivated by Bioinformatics applications as well. This is an impressive showing on the part of the BCB majors and minors because Bioinformatics and Computational Biology is only one of a multitude of areas of science and technology in which computing is being applied at ISU!

Congratulations to Scott, Changhui, Doina, and Adrian!

FIRST THURSDAY SUPPER AND SOCIAL NOVEMBER 6 (10-31-03)
Our November First Thursday will be held 5:00-6:30 pm on November 6 in 1102 Molecular Biology. To help us plan, please let us know by noon Wednesday, November 5, whether you will be able to attend. We hope to see you there!

NOVEMBER BIRTHDAYS (10-30-03; edited 1-4-07)
We have two students sharing the November birthday spotlight.

Myron PETO
Kent VANDER VELDEN

Hailong ZHANG
Hua ZHOU

If you know news, please let us know! News Tips