The Education Core of this Integrated Cancer Biology Program (ICBP) is designed to educate young scientists in integrative cancer biology. Rigorous programs will be developed through the support of our existing infrastructure, the Mathematical Biosciences Institute, located on the Ohio State University campus. This multidisciplinary institute has been established to develop mathematical models and theories that answer life science's growing need for high-end computation. The proposed mentoring programs are designed to facilitate active knowledge dissemination in systems cancer biology. Although the proposed 4 ICBP projects focus on epigenome research, the program will encompass broader areas of systems-scale knowledge in cancer-associated gene expression, signaling and metabolic networks, and genetic and epigenetic mutations. To achieve these goals, the Core will organize 3-week intensive summer workshops and a visiting-scientist mentoring program. These activities contain three key elements:1. The biological component will provide a description of tumor suppressor genes and oncogenes, DNA methylation, chromatin remodeling, promoter and first exon genome structure, and models of gene amplification and silencing, signaling networks, and tumor progression.2. The mathematical component will provide a description of clustering algorithms, drug-resistant dynamics, time-series analyses, genome annotation, feature selections, and Bayesian prediction.3. The third component will explore heuristic queries of relational databases and numerical software.The ICBP scientists will mentor participants who will acquire tools needed to pursue individual research interests. In this regard, molecular biology students will learn computational skills for analysis of experimentally generated data, and bioinformatics students will learn how the cancer genomes and epigenomes provide the data they manipulate. This cross-training in scientific languages will enhance the computational skills of the biologists and the cancer biology skills of the bioinformaticians, thus providing a new generation of systems scientists with a broader knowledge to apply to cancer research.
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