Overall Purpose of the proposed project, GPBA Short Laboratory Courses in High Throughput Biology, is to develop an interdisciplinary workforce capable of crossing disciplinary boundaries across biology, nanotechnology and computer sciences. Such a workforce will further develop recently emerging fields such as bioinformatics and help create new interdisciplines involving computations in high throughput biomedicine. The instrument to be used for this purpose is the Greater Philadelphia Bioinformatics Alliance (GPBA), a consortium of regional research and academic organizations dedicated to advancing bioinformatics and computational biology-the integration of biology and advanced computation sciences that is revolutionizing life science research and holds the promise for significantly improved healthcare. By linking together the Philadelphia region's broad knowledge base of talented bioinformatics workers in academia, research institutions and the private sector, GPBA is working to provide new solutions to major medical, life sciences and environmental challenges. This grant requests support for eight-to-ten week session of sequential short laboratory courses in high throughput biology. The sequence is composed of following modules: Introduction to System Biology; Modeling in System Biology; Microarrays and Transcript Profiling; Biostatistics and Analysis of Large-Scale Biological Data; Proteomics; and Pharmacogenomics. These modules are taught by experts from different institutions belonging to GPBA. All modules of the short laboratory courses program are hands-on, namely these courses have extensive wet laboratory and/or e-laboratory sessions. Taken together with other GPBA activities such as research internships and continuous learning via GPBA Virtual Institute, the short course program will lead to the emergence of skilled researchers with sufficient understanding of new disciplines in high throughput biology. The initial development efforts for this project have been funded by the National Science Foundation Program Innovation Grant entitled Greater Philadelphia Bioinformatics Alliance and by BioAdvance, Biotechnology Greenhouse of Southeastern Pennsylvania. The proposed program is necessitated by the fact that thousands of graduate science and engineering students in America have no access to high throughput biology laboratories. The GPBA Project will have a positive impact on public health by training young scientists in both life sciences and computational sciences and enable them harvest and fuse methods from these disciplines for advancing the diagnosis and treatment of complex diseases.
| Dampier, William; Tozeren, Aydin (2007) Signaling perturbations induced by invading H. pylori proteins in the host epithelial cells: a mathematical modeling approach. J Theor Biol 248:130-44 |
