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UALR Biosciences & Bioinformatics Seminar Series

NEWS

MCBIOS Conference

The 5th annual MCBIOS conference will be held in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, February 23-24, 2008 at Cox Convention Center, located in the Bricktown area, the historic center of Oklahoma City.

The Arkansas INBRE Bioinformatics Core

The goals of the Bioinformatics Core are to:

Support a graduate program and various Outreach programs in bioinformatics to address the regional shortage of trained bioinformaticists and computational biologists

The Arkansas INBRE is committed to providing support for the Joint Graduate Program in Bioinformatics.  This initiative, begun during the BRIN phase, is designed to address the shortage of trained bioinformaticists/computational biologists in our region.  Having a graduate program in bioinformatics based at UALR and partnering with UAMS is critical to attracting research faculty to these institutions.  The program’s website is: http://bioinformatics.ualr.edu/grad

The second area of concentration is Outreach via a summer fellowship program for students and workshops for information science students sand faculty.   Workshops ranging from 1 to 6 days in length and will cover a wide range of topics important to the AR INBRE Project Leaders and their students.  These workshop experiences encourage and facilitate the subsequent development of bioinformatics courses at UGIs and/or the incorporation of bioinformatics aspects into existing courses.   

The student fellowship program is designed to place computer science students in active biological, medical, and health science laboratories at one of the three lead institutions as a summer research experience.  Undergraduate students will be placed in research laboratories at the lead institutions to be involved in biomedical research projects interfacing with computational science.  The primary intent is to give these students a taste of what happens in biomedical research laboratories and an opportunity to learn a new “language.”  This experience is expected to encourage these students to consider future training as bioinformaticists and help them communicate more effectively with biomedical researchers.

 Provide hardware and software support for INBRE initiatives

As INBRE investigators, both at lead institutions and UGIs, generate large amounts of protein-relevant and gene expression data, an important function of the Bioinformatics Core is  now focused on storing, clustering, and classifying this information, and in designing tools to link heterogeneous search and analysis software into a smooth “software pipeline” accessible to all investigators. Our goal is to expand the existing facilities at UALR/UAMS to support distributed data management and analysis.  The Bioinformatics Core is working with UALR and UAMS Computing Services and networking staff to tailor and enhance current high-speed interconnectivity and support services to share distributed databases and to organize a regional grid computing effort.  This will allow seamless, authorized access to distributed data and services initially between UALR and UAMS, then to UAF, and eventually to the seven UGIs. The Bioinformatics Core will connect the partner UGIs to a regional grid-computing platform with established management services and security protocols, and train users to access and use these resources.  As the grid grows, researchers will have available an expanding set of computational resources, with access to computing facilities much larger than those available at their home institution. 

In addition to providing access to centralized databases for data management and various application tools for retrieving and analyzing data, the Bioinformatics Core supports web-based access to a variety of bioinformatics software and services.  We have establish a toolbox of open-source informatics applications and services based on a common set of operating principles and standards that support the UGIs’ diverse cancer and neuroscience research activities. As a major node in the planned regional computing grid, this facility allows easy access to software packages and computing resources not typically available to researchers within individual labs, especially at the Arkansas UGIs. The web-services/grid-computing platform will also foster collaboration between researchers through the use of shared facilities and common access points.  It is our intent to provide a well-developed and user-friendly web site to help UGI users identify software packages for their specific needs, and to access, download, and/or install them. Cluster web site is:  http://BIC.uams.edu

Conduct outreach to the UGIs to facilitate educational and research activities

A major goal of the Arkansas INBRE Bioinformatics Core is to build and sustain the intellectual infrastructure for bioinformatics within the state. This depends in part on an active group of investigators collaborating on bioinformatics research activities, as well as bioinformatics mentoring to address the bioinformatics needs of UGI researchers. During the BRIN phase, a Bioinformatics focus group was established with the main mission of promoting greater networking among Arkansas INBRE investigators with similar research interests.  Many of the investigators that comprise the Arkansas Bioinformatics Network meet on a regular basis as part of ongoing working group meetings at UAMS or UALR.  These meetings center on proteomics, genomics, and bioinformatics.  The Microarray Working Group, organized by Dr. Charlotte Peterson (Director of the UAMS Microarray Facility), meets monthly.  Topics are a mix of data presentations and discussions of microarray analysis approaches and software requirements.  Likewise, the Proteomics/Bioinformatics Users Group, organized by Dr. Kevin Raney (Director of the UAMS Proteomics Core Facility), meets monthly, and offers a mixture of data presentations and discussions of proteomics and bioinformatics approaches.  Outside speakers for these working groups are supported by the Breast Cancer Research Program (headed by Dr. Thomas Kieber-Emmons, a co-Director of the Bioinformatics Core).  All UGI faculty are invited to participate in these working groups.  Furthermore, members of the Outreach Team will attend these group meetings and keep the UGI PLs up to date on technical and conceptual developments relevant to the PLs’ research projects.

Outreach Team

The Bioinformatics Outreach Team is headed by Dr. Kieber-Emmons and consisting of Drs. Jennings, Xu, and Milanova.

Dr. Thomas Kieber-Emmons

UAMS College of Medicine

4301 W. Markham Street, #824

Little Rock, AR 42205

Phone: (501) 526-5930

Steven F. Jennings  

UALR Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering

Applied Science Department

ETAS 575

2801 S. University Ave.

Little Rock, AR 72204 

Phone: (501) 569-8216 

Fax:  (501) 569-8020 

Mariofanna Milanova

UALR Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering

Computer Science Department

Dickinson Hall, Room 515

2801 S. University Ave. Little Rock, AR 72204-1099

Phone: (501) 569-8150

Fax: (501) 569-8144

Dr. Xiaowei Xu

UALR Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering

Information Science Department
2801 S. University Ave.
Little Rock, AR 72204-1099

Phone: (501) 683-7266
Fax: (501) 683-7049
 

Bioinformatics at UAMS   |  Bioinformatics at UALR   |   Bioinformatics at UAF

MidSouth Computational Biology & Bioinformatics Society

  UAMS Access Grid Conference Center   |   UALR Access Grid Conference Center - Calendar

Bioinformatics Research Group   |    Bioinformatics Definition

Bioinformatics Cluster Web Site