WKU News - Dept of Biology

Bioinformatics training will benefit WKU students in genomics course

Two WKU biology professors and a graduate student recently completed bioinformatics training that will benefit students in a new genomics discovery course.

Dr. Rodney King, Dr. Claire Rinehart and Prasanna TamarapuParthasarathy visited the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Campus in Ashburn, Va., for a training session Dec. 14-18. The software training is part of an HHMI grant awarded to Dr. King and Dr. Rinehart.

WKU is a member of a select group of colleges and universities chosen to participate in a national science experiment designed to improve undergraduate science education. To engage freshman students in authentic research, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science Education Alliance implemented a nationwide program to introduce the science of genomics into the classroom.

The WKU professors and their graduate teaching assistant will apply the training in the Biology Department’s Genome Discovery and Exploration Program (GDEP). The course is designed to introduce incoming freshmen to research and draws on themes and techniques from biology, microbiology, molecular biology, genomics and bioinformatics.

In the fall 2009 semester, GDEP students isolated bacterial viruses from the environment and characterized them using a variety of techniques including DNA analysis and electron microscopy. The WKU Bioinformatics and Information Science Center (BISC) provided funding to complete the DNA sequence of one of the viruses purified by the GDEP students.

A second purified virus was sequenced by the Joint Genomes Institute through a contract with HHMI. The raw DNA sequence data was gathered during the Winter Term. During the spring 2010 semester, GDEP students will learn how use computer programs to identify all the viral genes and to make genome-wide comparisons to identify evolutionary relationships.

“This hands-on experience with the tools of bioinformatics is an outstanding training opportunity,” Dr. King said. “This unique program has helped the WKU Biology Department create an introductory pipeline to research experiences that complements our existing and planned instructional programs and allows freshman to engage in the thrill of discovery.”

During the recent training session at HHMI, the WKU researchers contributed to the annotation of a new bacterial virus genome. In recognition of their contributions, they are listed as co-authors on the DNA sequence submission to Genbank, the National Institutes of Health’s genetic sequence database.

Students who are interested in the phage genomics program at WKU are encouraged to visit the program website at: http://bioweb.wku.edu/ASP/WKUNGRI/Index.htm.

Contact: Rodney King, (270) 745-6910.