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Upcoming CELT Offerings (11/17/05 kmw)
The Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) continues to offer great opportunities for the TAs among us to hone our teaching skills.

*WebCT Vista Modules with WebCT representatives, November 17, 12-1pm and 3-4pm, 1230 Communications
*Managing the WebCT Gradebook, November 30, 9-10:30am, 1230 Communications
*Implementing Podcasting in the Classroom, November 30, 12-1:30pm, 1230 Communications

To register, email celt@iastate.edu or call 294-5357.

BCB Faculty Part of $29.5 Million Maize Genome Project (11/16/05 kmw)
BCB faculty member Pat Schnable and BCB chair Srinivas Aluru will lead ISU's efforts as part of a four-university three-year project to sequence the maize or corn genome. This project, involving the most complex genome to be sequenced to date, is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US Department of Agriculture and the US Department of Energy.

NSF also awarded ISU a separate $600,000 grant to help purchase a supercomputer to use in the corn genome sequencing project. BCB faculty Robert Jernigan and Arun Somani are PIs on this award.

Congratulations to Dr. Schnable, Dr. Aluru, Dr. Jernigan and Dr. Somani! Read all about it here.

BCB/GDCB 542D - Spring Offering on Plant Transformation and Transgenic Plant Analysis (11/14/05 ts)

1 credit Workshop:

This is a one-credit laboratory course aiming at learning basic knowledge and techniques on plant genetic transformation and molecular analysis of transgenic plants.  Upon completion of the course, students should be able to do the following:
 
1)                  Making plant media
2)                  Introducing DNA vectors into Agrobacterium strains
3)                  Plasmid DNA extraction from Agrobacterium
4)                  Basic aseptic techniques for plant tissue culture
5)                  Agrobacterium-mediated tobacco leaf disc transformation
6)                  Arabidopsis flower-dipping transformation
7)                  Some steps of the biolistic gun-mediate maize transformation
8)                  Plant DNA extraction
9)                  Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)
10)              Southern Blot and hybridization

• Graduate students majoring any discipline of plant sciences
• Graduate students majoring any science discipline but with an intention to collaborate with plant scientists.
• Any one who is interested in plant genetic transformation

Contact person:                     Kan Wang, 294-4429
 
Maximum enrollment:          12 students
 
Location:                                3140 and B423 Agronomy
 
Schedule for Spring 2006:     12:30 to 4:00 pm, Wednesdays and Fridays

Classes Meetings:                February 1, 3, 15, 17, 22, 24; March 29, 31; and April 5, 12

BCB/ComS 549 - The Tree of Life!! (11/14/05 ts)
Advanced Algorithms in Computational Biology will be offered Spring 2006. The course studies the design and analysis of advanced algorithms for problems in molecular biology.

Topics include:
1) Phylogenetics: Phylogenetic Networks and Algorithms for the Tree of Life;
2) Alignments: Sparse Dynamic Programming; Combined Alignment and Tree Construction; Structural Alignment and
3) Protein Structure: Protein Folding and Inverse Protein Folding

Prereq.: No background in biology is assumed. A basic background in algorithms (e.g. ComS 311 or ComS 548) is required.
Meeting time: TR 11 - 12:20
Place: 1324 Howe Hall
Instructor: Oliver Eulenstein
Contacts: oeulenst@cs.iastate.edu

Upcoming Baker Center Seminars (11/8/05 kmw)
Douglas L. Brutlag, Department of Biochemistry, Stanford University School of Medicine, will present Discovering transcription factor binding sites at 1:10 pm Monday, November 14, in the Alliant Energy-Lee Liu Auditorium in Howe Hall.

On Tuesday, November 15, Ilya A. Vakser, Center for Bioinformatics, University of Kansas, will present Modeling of protein-protein complexes in structural genomics at 1:10 pm in Alliant Energy-Lee Liu Auditorium in Howe Hall.

See Laurence H. Baker Center for Bioinformatics and Biological Statistics seminar series for a complete seminar listing. All seminars are free and open to ISU's bioinformatics and computational biology community.

BCB Faculty Seminar with Stephen Willson, Nov. 11 at 12:10 in E164 Lagomarcino (11/7/05 ts)
Stephen Willson from the Mathematics Department will present a talk entitled, "Building Supertrees Using Distances" at the next BCB Faculty Seminar, Nov. 11. His abstract follows:

Suppose that a family of rooted phylogenetic trees with different sets of leaves is given. A supertree for the family would be a single rooted tree T whose leaf set is the union of all the input leaf sets, such that the branching information in T corresponds to the branching information in all the input trees. This talk gives an overview of some methods for finding supertrees. It focuses on a polynomial-time method BUILD-WITH-DISTANCES that makes essential use of distance information provided on the input trees. When a supertree containing also the distance information exists, then the method produces a supertree T. This supertree often shows increased resolution over the trees found by methods that utilize only the topology of the input trees. When no strict supertree exists because the input trees are incompatible, an extension of the method still produces a tree with interesting properties.

November Birthdays (10/28/05; edited 1-4-07 kmw)
Not quite so many birthdays to celebrate this month, but some very special ones!

Erin Boote Jones, MGET
Myron Peto, BCB and MGET
Jeffry Sander, BCB and MGET
Rajakumar Sankula, BCB
Trish Stauble
Kent Vander Velden, BCB and IGERT
Hailong Zhang, BCB alumnus
Hua Zhou, BCB alumnus

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