Liang Feng was the Institute's first graduate student to take her Written/Oral Comprehensive exams yesterday, Nov. 10, 2009; she passed with flying colors. Congratulations Liang!!!! She has applied for Admission to Candidacy to the graduate school for her Doctoral Degree!

We welcome Rachel Crockett to the Institute of Bioinformatics as Sharon Cabe's Office Assistant. She is a UGA undergraduate with Health Promotion and Behavior with a concentration on Pre-Med. Welcome Rachel!!!

Janani Varatharajan has made IOB history by completing her degree and will be our first Institute of Bioinformatics graduate this Fall 09 with her MS degree with Thesis (Completed). Congratulations Janani, and we wish you much success in your future endeavors!! Dr. Ying Xu and IOB

Dr. Jeffrey Dean, Professor, Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at UGA has been appointed as the Institute of Bioinformatics new Graduate Coordinator. Welcome Dr. Dean!! jeffdean@uga.edu

Dr. Liming Cai, Professor, UGA Computer Science Department, has been appointed as the Institute of Bioinformatics Associate Director. cai@cs.uga.edu Welcome Dr. Cai!!

Dr. Natarajan Kannan of the Institue of Bioinformatics at the University of Georgia has been named the Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar. This award is given by the Georgia Cancer Coalition (GCC), http://www.georgiacancer.org, to clinicians and scientist who are engaged in the most promising areas of cancer research. Dr. Kannan's research focuses on understanding how somatic mutations alter the activity of protein kinases-one of the most frequently mutated gene familes in human cancers. Congratulations! Dr. Kannan!!!!!

Our Office Manager, Sharon James, married William Danny Cabe on Sat. May 30, 2009; the wedding was wonderful and many of our IOB graduate students and friends attended.. Congratulations! Danny and Sharon! Sharon is now Mrs. Sharon M. Cabe.

The First Institute of Bioinformatics Faculty Retreat was held at Whitehall Forrest, Flinchum's Phoenix, Warnell School ofForestry facility, on Wed. Jan. 7, 2009, 10:00 AM -4:00 PM. Ms. Sharon James and the Director, Dr. Ying Xu, of the Institute opened the meeting by welcoming everyoneand wishing them a "Happy New Year 2009." We had 23 IOB Faculty members attending and enjoyed a comprehensive business meeting; lunch was provided by The Institute of Bioinformatics, catered by Tate Catering and enjoyed by all. We enjoyed a seminar by Dr. John McDonald of the School of Biology at the Georgia Technical Institute. The Bioinformatics 2nd Year Graduate Students presented abstracts and posters on their current research interests. Two students received recognition and will receive a reward for the best two posters of their research presented at the retreat. Wen Chi Chou, and Ranjit Bagal. Congrats to both of you!!! We look forward to our next IOB retreat.

Three graduate students from the Institute of Bioinfomatics were nominated for selection to "Who's Who Among USA Graduate Students," they were Anuj Srivastava, Liang Feng, and Wen Chi Chou. The finalist chosen to represent the IOB was Anuj Srivastava, who is pursueing his PHD in Bioinformatics; his name will be submitted to the National "Who's Who Among USA Graduate Students" organization and could be among the 10 ten students chosen in May 09 for a $1000 award. Congratulations to Anuj and good luck!!!

BIGSA will host a BBQ at Sandy Creek State Park, Commerce Exit, Highway 441, Athens, Ga., 12:00 PM - 4:00 PM, Friday, Oct. 31, 2008 for its members, IOB faculty members and staff.

A Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) T32 Training Proposal was submitted to the National Institute of Health, Dr. Heinz-Bernd Schuttler, Principal Director/Investigator.

Dr. Heinz-Bernd Schuttler, a professor in Physics and Astronomy became our new Graduate Coordinator for the Instiute. We thank Dr. Liming Cai for his service as previous term as Graduate Coordinator.

The Institute of Bioinformatics was awarded funding from the National Science Foundation for the "MRI: Acquisition of a Computer Cluster for Bioinformtaics Research at UGA," Dr. Ying Xu, Principal Investigator.

A Computational Environment for Comparative Analyses of Prokaryotic Genomes" proposal was submitted to the National Science Fouondation,Dr. Ying Xu is the Principal Investigator.

Second Annual Computational and Systems Biology Symposium http://www.bioinformatics.uga.edu/Sym2007.php

Third Annual Computational and Systems Biology Symposium http://www.bioinformatics.uga.edu/Sym2008.php

The Bioinformatics Graduate Student Association will celebrate their first Thanksgiving dinner, Tuesday, November 20, 2007, 3:30 PM. Location TBA.

The Bioinformatics Graduate Student Association has its own email address: biograds@uga.edu.

The Institute of Bioinformatics is pleased to announce: Dorothy Hammond was elected as our first president of the Bioinformatics Graduate Student Association BIGSA.

Liming Cai has been appointed as the Graduate Coordinator of the Institute of Bioinformatics, effective January 3, 2007. Dr. Cai is Associate Professor of Computer Science with a research focus in algorithms, computational biology and theory of computation..

The IOB is pleased to announce the acquisition of considerable research computing power for our members. These new resources were acquired via a significant investment, ($500,000) by the IOB in the University of Georgia's Research Computing Center http://www.rcc.uga.edu/. The funding was negotiated by Dr. Ying Xu, the IOB director, as part of his recruitment package and decision to accept the directorship of the IOB http://www.bioinformatics.uga.edu.

Effective immediately, IOB members have priority access to the equivalent of 120 dual nodes of processing power on the new rCluster http://www.rcc.uga.edu/systems/rcluster/ in the RCC. The rCluster contains a state-of-the-art scheduling system that will treat requests to use the resource fairly. Full IOB members will have immediate access to 16 dual processor nodes and associate members will have access to 8 dual processor nodes, subject to their availability.

Members of the IOB who currently have accounts with the RCC have had their access privileges automatically upgraded (for themselves and members of their laboratories). The "home" account that you, or your lab members, currently have at the RCC will be the same one you will have for rCluster access. There is no need to create new passwords or move files.

Members of the IOB that do not currently have RCC accounts, may register at: http://www.rcc.uga.edu/contact/account.html. Be sure to indicate your affiliation with the IOB on the registration form.? If you are unsure of your IOB status, please visit the IOB web site for a listing http://www.bioinformatics.uga.edu or contact Jane Berko at 542-7783 or janeb@uga.edu

Instructions on the use of the rCluster and IOB queues are located at the rCluster link above. However, since this cluster is a new machine that employs new management and scheduling software relative to existing resources, an information session is planned in which RCC staff will be available to answer users questions about the rCluster and the RCC in general. Please watch the IOB listserve for an announcement of this information session.

Robert A. Scott has been appointed as Associate Director of IOB, effective June 1. In the past year and half, Dr. Scott has been serving as the Chair of the IOB Advisory Committee. Dr. Scott brings to this position expertise in biophysics and molecular biology, a keen interest in systems biology, and the administrative experience to help grow the institute and its influence at UGA and beyond.

Jessica Kissinger would like to announce that she will be hosting a database workshop in June, 2006. For more details, go to http://apidb.org/workshop2006/

Professor Amit Sheth (Computer Science Department) gave a keynote talk at the IFIP Working Conference on Industrial Applications of Semantic Web (IASW - 2005), Jyvaskyla, Finland, August 25-27, 2005. The talk covered Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services in Bioinformatics.

Ying Xu co-chaired the IEEE/Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference (http://conferences.computer.org/bioinformatics/) at Stanford, CA, August 8 - 11, 2005.

Ying Xu co-chaired Changchun Intnerational Bioinformatics Workshop (http://cs.jlu.edu.cn/bioinfo-workshop/), held in Changchun, China, July 5- 7, 2005.

The Institute of Bioinformatics and Department of Microbiology are pleased to welcome Dr. Jan Mrazek as Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Bioinformatics at UGA. Currently a Research Associate in the Department of Mathematics at Stanford University, his research focus is comparative genomics and the structure and evolution of microbial genomes. He will join us in August, with offices and computer laboratory in the Biological Sciences Building. We look forward to having Dr. Mrazek as a colleague here at UGA.

Summer bioinformatics school will start on June 13, 2005.

The Institute of Bioinformatics and the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology are pleased to announce that Dr. Shaying Zhao, Assistant Investigator at The Institute of Genomic Research (TIGR), is joining the UGA faculty in the area of cancer bioinformatics. She will be appointed Assistant Professor beginning August 2005 and will have her office and laboratory in the Fred C. Davison Life Sciences Complex. Please join us in welcoming Dr. Zhao to the Institute and Department.

The first annual UGA Symposium on Computational and Systems Biology will be held 11 November 2005 at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education on the UGA campus. This one-day symposium will highlight applications of bioinformatics and post-genomic technologies to biological problems in many areas. When the symposium website is available, it will be announced here.

IOB is in the process of establishing a degree program in bioinformatics - updated information will be posted August 2005.

IOB is currently hosting visiting faculty Dr. Tong Zhou, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Dr. Homayoun Valafar, University of South Carolina for the IOB Summer Visiting Faculty Program 2005.

A new version of the online Cryptospordium genomics database, CryptoDB (http://CryptoDB.org), was released by Dr. Jessie Kissinger's lab in April. This release represents a major upgrade of the database software. CryptoDB now offer searches by gene and contig name in addition to key word and protein features. Results are displayed graphically and provide additional useful information for each gene or contig. CryptoDB, headed by Jessica Kissinger of the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, and Department of Genetics at UGA, is a member of the NIH/NIAID funded Bioinformatics Resource Center, ApiDB (http://ApiDB.org), established to provide apicomplexan genomic resources. The ApiDB Resource Center will not only integrate bioinformatics resources related to Apicomplexan organisms, but will establish collaborations with other NIH funded Bioinformatics Resource Center for Biodefense and Emerging/Re-emerging Infectious Diseases (http://www.niaid.nih.gov/dmid/genomes/brc/) to truly facilitate research on pathogens and their vectors.