NSF Award
0839970
BIATECH Nonprofit Research Center is awarded a grant to develop a prototype of a customizable, easy-to-use, and robust database and data analysis software environment for analyzing microbial proteomes. Simultaneous development of statistical models and analysis software, with concurrent application to new biological data, is preferable to isolated activity because of the high degree of feedback between these domains. The investigators will work with multiple microorganisms, enabling a rapid development and testing cycle that is robust to differences across species, resulting in tools that are readily available to the broader scientific community. The investigators will record dynamic organism state and environment data and incorporate these into the analysis, providing a rich potential for further discovery. The investigators will freely provide the broader scientific community with usable database schema, software, and statistical models, and the results of applying these to the analysis of the three microorganisms. To encourage community use of the products of this research, the investigators will develop a special Summer Program to instruct undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research staff, beginning with those of the collaborating laboratories. The participants of this Summer Program will learn, test, and apply the complete cycle of the proposed developments and innovations to their organisms of interest, with the aim of enabling them to deploy the tools and techniques at their own labs. Additionally, BIATECH will host science courses for high school students from public schools in the area, with priority given to at-risk and underprivileged youth. These students will gain first-hand experience of how a real scientific lab operates through hands-on sample preparation, mass spectrometry experimentation, and computational analysis.
