As a result of an international competition, UCC students of Microbiology, Genetics and Bioinformatics will be involved in the project which is being led by the internationally renowned US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), a world leading institute in DNA sequencing located in Walnut Creek, California. In fact, UCC is only one of three non-US universities selected for the 2010 DOE Joint Genome Institute’s “Education Program” project, the other two being in Lund, Sweden, and in St George’s in Grenada, West Indies.
The project at UCC will be led by Dr Avril Coghlan and Dr Paul O’Toole, two lecturers in the UCC Microbiology Department. Drs Coghlan and O’Toole submitted an application to JGI on behalf of their students, who are studying a range of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in UCC, including the BSc in Genetics, BSc in Microbiology, and the new MSc in Bioinformatics with Systems Biology.
Drs Coghlan and O’Toole are delighted that UCC was chosen as one of the few sites to be involved in the JGI Education Program as the experience will give the students enhanced bioinformatics skills and also training in research and collaboration which will be invaluable in their later careers in either scientific research or the biotechnology industry.
Dr Coghlan and Dr O’Toole are both involved in research and teaching of a field called “bioinformatics”, a field at the intersection of biology and computer science that involves analysing biological data using computers. One hot topic in the field of bioinformatics is ‘genome analysis’, that is, analysing the DNA sequences of different species to try to identify their genes and understand their biology. In the JGI project, the students will gain hands-on expertise in applying the latest bioinformatics technologies to analyse bacterial genome (DNA) sequences.
The US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, supported by DOE’s Office of Science, is committed to advancing genomics in support of DOE missions related to clean energy generation and environmental characterization and cleanup. DOE JGI, headquartered in Walnut Creek, California, provides integrated high-throughput sequencing and computational analysis that enable systems-based scientific approaches to these challenges.
For more information, see:http://www.jgi.doe.gov/education/genomeannotation.html
Picture: Dr Paul O’Toole and Dr Avril Coghlan, Microbiology Department who will lead UCC’s participation in an international research project.
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