Wheaton wins NSF grant for genomics
October 17, 2001
Wheaton's genomics research group is poised to help other colleges launch genomics studies of their own. The college has been awarded a grant of nearly $25,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in support of interdisciplinary collaborations in biology and computer science.
The grant will fund summer workshops at Wheaton for biology and computer science faculty nationwide who want to integrate genomics, the computational analysis of DNA sequences, into their undergraduate curricula. It also supports the development of collaborative teaching techniques between professors in the disciplines of computer science and biology or other sciences.
Professor of Biology Betsey Dyer and Associate Professor of Computer Science Mark LeBlanc submitted the grant proposal. Dyer and LeBlanc are using computers and algorithms to uncover DNA's rules of grammar. The discovery tools they are developing enable a user to find regulatory sequences in the intergenic areas of the genome. These all-important regulatory sequences are the pieces of code that, for example, instruct eyes to develop in the front of the head instead of all over the body.
''Imagine that you have the entire works of Shakespeare in front of you, with no spaces and no grammar, and you don't know English,'' Dyer explained. ''The tools we are developing take a long string of 'words' and create a kind of grammar and syntax for the human genome, making it readable.'' Dyer and LeBlanc have been collaborators in genomics collaboration for undergraduates for three years, beginning when LeBlanc requested that Dyer help him find some problems of biological interest for his algorithms class. The two professors informally linked their ''Cell Evolution'' and ''Algorithms'' classes, which led to the formation of the Genomics Research Group, a student faculty research collaboration. The group has received internal college funding on a year-round basis and has produced a senior thesis, a published paper and the submission of a patent application.
''These are times as exciting as when adventurers in wooden ships set out to [OE]discover' new lands. The genomic terrain is so rich and unexplored that even undergraduates can make original and novel investigations,'' said Dyer in the grant proposal. For more on the Wheaton genomics project, go to http://genomics.wheatoncollege.edu.
Last updated on 10/17/01.
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