Matthew Gottbrecht | Camilo Mateus | Jim Norris and David John
Pamela Marcott and Katie Flowers | Jason Fye | Mary Beth Ward
Matthew Gottbrecht, a senior physics major at Wake Forest University, is doing research on protein structure and protein active site analysis with Professor Jacquelyn Fetrow in the Computational Biophysics Group. Matt’s project involves identifying the structural components that give rise to the different active site chemistry and substrate specificities found in the large enolase protein family. He is also involved in the Wake Forest rugby team and plans to attend medical school upon graduation. Matt presented his research as a poster at the Keystone Conference on Computational Drug Discovery in April 2008. During the summer 2008, Matt participated in a medical internship program. Matt has the following observation about undergraduate research: “It's definitely a really cool feeling when you actually put to use the stuff you learn in the classroom—it actually motivates you to study harder so you know the material as well as possible.”
Cam Mateus is an undergraduate student working in the Computational Biophysics research group at Wake Forest. Cam, a chemistry major, is working on classifying the active site of members of the serine hydrolase protein family. The ultimate goal is to be able to identify specificity in protein functional sites and to design inhibitors or drugs that are specific to individual members of the protein family using only computer tools. This family is of interest because there has been much recent work on using chemical proteomics and activity-based profiling methods to identify the specificity of inhibitors in this protein family. Cam recently presented his work as a poster at the Keystone Conference on Computer Aided Drug Design in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Jim Norris, a professor in mathematics, and David John, a professor in computer science, recently presented their work at the IEEE 7th BIBE at Harvard Medical, Boston (Oct. 14-17, 2007). Their manuscript, entitled “Metropolis-Hastings Algorithm and Continuous Regression for finding Next-State Models of Protein Modification using Information Scores,” describes their work to develop continuous methods for modeling time course biological data. IEEE BIBE, a large international conference with 7 years of tradition, provides a common platform for the cross fertilization of ideas, to help shape knowledge and scientific achievements by bridging the fields of bioinformatics and bioengineering.
Undergraduate math majors Pam Marcott and Katie Flowers are doing research on computational systems biology with Ed Allen and Jacque Fetrow. These two students are applying computational algebra methods to model time course gene expression data from dendritic cells. Dendritic cells are the sentinels of the immune system—these cells sense and respond to pathogens and inform the adaptive immune system on the nature of the foreign invader. Understanding the maturation process by which they respond to foreign invaders is key to understanding and controlling the immune system. Katie was awarded a summer undergraduate research fellowship from Wake Forest University. Pam is also working on research this summer and will be traveling to London for a semester abroad during the Fall 2008 semester.
Jason Fye presented his thesis research as a poster at the ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) Conference held in Toronto in July 2008. Jason's research focuses on the use of information theoretic approaches to clustering gene expression data and probabilistic approaches to identifying potential regulatory motifs in DNA sequences. Jason was also awarded an ISMB Travel Award from the organizers of the meeting. Jason received his MS degree in Computer Science and a certificate in Structural and Computational Biophysics from Wake Forest University in May 2008. He is now pursuing a PhD in Biochemistry at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. (The ISMB conferences began in 1993 and were the driving force behind the founding of the International Society for Computational Biology (www.iscb.org) in 1997, which has been organizing this conference ever since.)
In July 2008, Mary Beth Ward presented her undergraduate research as a poster at the 22nd Annual Symposium of The Protein Society in San Diego CA. Mary Beth is a senior biology major at Wake Forest University. For the past two years, she has been doing research on protein structure and protein active site analysis with Professor Jacquelyn Fetrow in the Computational Biophysics Group. Her research involves the analysis of reactive cysteine residues in proteins, with an aim towards identifying the specificity determinants that determine cysteine reactivity towards different compounds. Mary Beth is a Reynolds Scholar at Wake Forest University. During the summer 2007, she spent an internship in Daniel Leibler's laboratory at Vanderbilt University, learning some of the experimental details involved in collecting the proteomic data that she is analyzing.
