This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY 2005. The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce.
The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled "Evolution of introns in untranslated regions of genes". Using predictions and insight from theoretical population genetics, this project seeks ultimately to provide creative methods and results for studying the evolution of traits in long-lived plants, where generation times make existing methods impractical if not impossible. The current focus is on the use of informatics tools to explore the evolution of untranslated regions (UTRs) of genes, and specifically the evolution of introns within UTRs. Introns are regions of genes that are removed prior to their translation into proteins, and mistakes in the removal of introns are implicated in about one-third of human diseases. Genome sequence data will be used from many separate species to explore the effect of population size, and genome features, on the structure and evolution of introns. A publicly available database of introns found in UTRs is being constructed, as are several software tools that will be of use to evolutionary and genome biologists.
The training goals are to learn the theories of genome evolution and the techniques of genome biology. In combination with the Fellow's extensive experience in both evolutionary genetics and software engineering, the fellowship will provide a solid foundation for robust, comprehensive design of large bioinformatics projects.
