This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY 2006. 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 "Using bioinformatics and experiment to improve gene annotation: a study of molecular recognition in O-phosphoseryl-tRNA synthetase." The genomic revolution delivered vast sequence data that include many genes of unknown or ill-defined function. One such gene, O-phosphoseryl-tRNA synthetase (SepRS), is a component of the long sought for euryarchaeal cysteine coding pathway. Guided by phylogenetics and modeling, molecular recognition in SepRS is being determined experimentally, and an algorithm developed to automatically identify additional misclassified gene families. A long-term goal of the work is to establish a bioinformatics and experimental protocol to discover new gene families and to improve gene annotation.
The training program, complementing previous research in bioinformatics, focuses on experimental methods for defining protein function, including site-direct mutagenesis, comparative enzyme kinetics and RNA footprinting.
