BOL: Related items

India and Germany to begin joint research in the area of 'Bioinformatics in Health Research'

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 14:10:36 -0600

To facilitate bilateral cooperation in biotechnology between the scientific communities of India and Germany, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) will soon begin collaborative research in the identified priority area of 'Bioinformatics in Health Research' under the programme of Indo-German Cooperation in Health Research.

The purpose of the programme is to stimulate new collaborations, e.g. the preparation of joint projects under national funding programmes. The programme facilitates bilateral cooperation in biotechnology between the scientific communities of India and Germany by way of joint research projects which will encompass bilateral workshops/seminar and exchange visits of scientists.

The programme is being implemented within the agreement of Indo-German cooperation in S&T of 1974, under which the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India and Forschungszentrum Julich BMBH (FZJ), Federal Republic of Germany, have agreed for cooperative programme in biotechnology.

DBT of the Ministry of Science & Technology, Government of India and the Project Management Agency at the German Aerospace Center (DLR-PT, European and International Cooperation), Bonn are the nodal implementing agencies from the Indian and German side respectively.

Through this programme, it is expected that the funded cooperation enables the partners to develop applicable scientific results which can be published and/ or could be commercialised and may lead to formation of joint ventures. All publications, patents coming out of these projects, need to be jointly authored by both Indian and German scientists. All necessary approvals like ethical clearance, HMSC approval from Indian point of view as well as EU, if applicable, from German point of view, e.g. before conducting animal experimentation if any needs to be obtained by PIs before undertaking the project.

Now, both the nodal agencies have invited research proposals in identified priority area of 'Bioinformatics in Health Research' from eligible scientists. Joint research projects are required to be submitted to both the nodal agencies by 15 January 2018. Scientists/faculty members working in regular capacity in universities, national R&D laboratories/institutes and private R&D institutes can be part of this joint research programme. For the private sector, partners from all kind of private sectors are eligible, but financing is limited. For Indian scientists from the private sector, only local hospitality in Germany as part of the exchange visit is available from the German side. For German scientists from the private sector, only travel costs are available for small and medium size enterprises (for definition of SME ref. to 2003/361/EC) as well as local hospitality in India will be borne by themselves.

Queensland Centre for Medical Genomics, Grimmond Lab

Sun, 14 Jul 2013 11:58:34 -0500

Queensland Centre for Medical Genomics

Research Area:
pancreatic cancer; ovarian cancer; prostate cancer; bowel cancer; brain cancer; endometrial cancer; breast cancer; personalised medicine; high-throughput genomics

Link @ http://www.imb.uq.edu.au/sean-grimmond

Lateral Gene Transfer Is Enriched in Cancer Samples

Jitendra Narayan — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 05:13:06 -0500

There has been always a confusion on cancer and bacteria relationship. This is the first paper which shows lateral gene transfer causes cancer.

Find more at http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1003107

Cancer's origins revealed

Jitendra Narayan — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 13:06:56 -0500

Researchers have provided the first comprehensive compendium of mutational processes that drive tumour development. Together, these mutational processes explain most mutations found in 30 of the most common cancer types. This new understanding of cancer development could help to treat and prevent a wide-range of cancers.

More at >> http://www.sanger.ac.uk/about/press/2013/130814.html

Cancer Growth Animation

Fri, 20 Sep 2013 06:16:51 -0500

This video demonstrates how cancer growth happens in human body.

Evolution and Cancer

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 11:28:49 -0500

Air date: Wednesday, January 04, 2012, 3:00:00 PM Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local Category: Wednesday Afternoon Lectures Description: There is a broad consensus that cancer is the result of somatic cells having serially gained, by a series of mutations, the ability to grow independently, to recruit resources from the circulation and the stroma, to invade local tissues, and to found anatomically distant metastases, ultimately killing the host. From the point of view of the cancer-causing somatic cell population, this is evolution driven by mutation and selection. Genomics has resulted in a parallel consensus that the central functions of all eukaryotes are highly conserved, not only at the level of individual protein functions, but also complex biological pathways and systems. These ideas motivated a comparison between results of molecular genetic studies of experimental evolution in yeast and the molecular genetic phenomena associated with tumorigenesis and tumor progression. We find some very striking similarities, including recurring genomic rearrangements, alterations of the regulation of specific growth-promoting genes, population-genetic features that affect the fitness trajectories of growth rate variants in evolving populations, and physiological and metabolic similarities derived from the conservation of the basic plan of growth and cell multiplication among all eukaryotes. It is hoped that some of the insights from yeast will aid the interpretation of sequence changes found in tumors, especially in the urgent necessity to distinguish 'driver' from 'passenger' mutations." David Botstein's fundamental contributions to modern genetics include the development of genetic methods for understanding biological functions and the discovery of the functions of many yeast and bacterial genes. In 1980, Botstein and three colleagues proposed a method for mapping human genes that laid the groundwork for the Human Genome Project. The basic principle of the mapping scheme was to develop, by recombinant DNA techniques, random single-copy DNA probes capable of detecting DNA sequence polymorphisms when hybridized to restriction digests, or specific fragments, of an individual's DNA. The method was used in subsequent years to identify several human disease genes, such as Huntington's and BRCA1. Variations of this method enabled the sequencing phase of the Human Genome Project. In the 1990s Botstein, having moved to Stanford University School of Medicine, collaborated with Patrick O. Brown of Stanford in exploiting DNA microarrays to study genome-wide gene expression patterns in yeast and in human cancers. This required developing a new statistical method and graphical interface, widely used today to interpret genomic data. Botstein also has helped to create, with Michael Ashburner and Gerald Rubin, a bioinformatics initiative to unify the representation of gene and gene product attributes across all species, called Gene Ontology. He graduated from Harvard College and earned his doctorate from the University of Michigan. He worked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1967 to 1988; served as vice president for science at Genentech from 1988 to 1990; chaired the Department of Genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine from 1990 to 2003; and joined the Princeton University faculty in 2003. He has sat on numerous editorial boards and was the founding editor of Molecular Biology of the Cell. Among recent major awards, Bostein won the Peter Gruber Foundation Prize in Genetics in 2003, the Apple Science Innovator Award in 2008, and the Albany Medical Center Prize in 2010. The NIH Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series includes weekly scientific talks by some of the top researchers in the biomedical sciences worldwide. For more information, visit: The NIH Director's Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series Author: Dr. David Botstein, Princeton University Runtime: 00:59:58 Permanent link: http://videocast.nih.gov/launch.asp?17046

Troyanskaya Lab

Fri, 18 Oct 2013 10:57:40 -0500

In our research, we combine computational methods with an experimental component in a unified effort to develop comprehensive descriptions of genetic systems of cellular controls, including those whose malfunctioning becomes the basis of genetic disorders, such as cancer, and others whose failure might produce developmental defects in model systems.

Research Interest
Genomic Data Integration

Microarray Analysis

Gene and Protein Function Prediction

Detection and Analysis of Chromosomal Abnormalities and Functional Evolution

Integration of Computation and Experiments

Identification of Biological Networks and Pathways

Evaluation and Validation of Computational Predictions

Scalable Visualization-Based Data Analysis

More @ http://reducio.princeton.edu/cm/
PI page @ http://reducio.princeton.edu/cm/ogt

Paper test for cancer !!!

Shruti Paniwala — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:20:30 -0600

The American Cancer Society projects the numbers of new cancer cases and deaths expected each year in order to estimate the contemporary cancer burden, because cancer incidence and mortality data lag three to four years behind the current year. In addition, the regularly updated Facts & Figures publications present the most current trends in cancer occurrence and survival, as well as information on symptoms, prevention, early detection, and treatment. Cancer rates in developing nations have climbed sharply in recent years, and now account for 70 percent of cancer mortality worldwide. Early detection has been proven to improve outcomes, but screening approaches such as mammograms and colonoscopy, used in the developed world, are too costly to be implemented in settings with little medical infrastructure.

The US born Sangeeta Bhatia at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a cheap, simple, paper test that can detect cancer. These diagnostic, which works much like a pregnancy test, could reveal within minutes, based on a urine sample, whether a person have cancer or not. The MIT media announce the major and amazing breakthrough in cancer diagonistics. These newly developed technology will allow non-communicable diseases to be detect at early stage, which will be cheap and easily accessible to the masses. For the developing world it would be exciting to adapt it instead to a paper test that could be performed on unprocessed samples in a rural setting, without the need for any specialized equipment. The simple readout could even be transmitted to a remote caregiver by a picture on a mobile phone.

The MIT professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Sangeeta Bhatia, who is also the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, invented a new class of synthetic biomarker, which is highly specialized instrument to do these kind of analysis. These paper test essentially relies on nanoparticles that interact with tumor proteins called proteases, each of which can trigger release of hundreds of biomarkers that are then easily detectable in a patient's urine. The MIT nanoparticles are coated with peptides (short protein fragments) targeted by different MMPs. These particles congregate at tumor sites, where MMPs cleave hundreds of peptides, which accumulate in the kidneys and are excreted in the urine.

To create the test strips, the researchers first coated nitrocellulose paper with antibodies that can capture the peptides. Once the peptides are captured, they flow along the strip and are exposed to several invisible test lines made of other antibodies specific to different tags attached to the peptides. If one of these lines becomes visible, it means the target peptide is present in the sample. The technology can also easily be modified to detect multiple types of peptides released by different types or stages of disease.

In tests in mice, the researchers were able to accurately identify colon tumors, as well as blood clots. Bhatia says these tests represent the first step toward a diagnostic device that could someday be useful in human patients. "This is a new idea — to create an excreted biomarker instead of relying on what the body gives you," she says. "To prove this approach is really going to be a useful diagnostic, the next step is to test it in patient populations."

Reference:

Image: jasongrowclients

Homepage: http://lmrt.mit.edu/about.html

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2014/a-paper-diagnostic-for-cancer-0224.html

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/PIO-develops-cheap-paper-test-to-detect-cancer/articleshow/30963615.cms

Scientist at Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer - Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 04:16:15 -0500

Scientist
Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer - Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra
Scientist (One position)
Project: Bioinformatics centre DBT- Sub-DIC at ACTREC
Funding agency: DBT Grant No.232

Duration of the Project: Six Months from the date of appointment can be extended further for six months
Essential Qualification and Experience: 1st Class Masters Degree in Bioinformatics or Life Sciences equivalent degree from a recognized University with 4 years R&D experience in Bioinformatics or relevant subjects from recognized institutes.
OR
Ph.D. degree in Bioinformatics or Life Sciences from recognized University.
M.Sc. degree obtained after a one year course will not be considered.
Experience: Research/teaching experience in Bioinformatics or relevant subjects form recognized Institute(s).

More at http://www.actrec.gov.in/data%20files/Vacancies/2016/AV-scin-stud-trainee-6-Sept-16.docx

Computer scientist/bioinformatician at IEO in Milan, Italy

Thu, 31 Jan 2019 09:10:12 -0600

We are looking for a computer scientist or a bioinformatician with a strong computation background to join the bioinformatics unit of the IEO in Milan. Web development, scripting, experience with spring boot, hpc, docker are appreciated. The candidate will evolve in a research environment (next generation sequencing among others). The selected candidate will consolidate our team for the development and maintenance of the bioinformatics resources, and will have the opportunity to support the research groups in setting new tools and pipelines.

Place of employment and work

The candidate will be located at the Department of Experimental Oncology of the European Institute of Oncology in Milan (Italy), one of Europe’s leading research institutes in biomedical research, where he/she will also interact with one of the largest computational biology communities in Italy

Requirements:

The candidate should have a good knowledge of the UNIX system and good programming skills (bash, R, python, java). Background in bioinformatics would be appreciated but is not mandatory. Additional experience with containers (docker, singularity), grid computing, web frameworks, continuous integrations will be appreciated.

For further info or to arrange an informal interview, please write to arnaud.ceol@ieo.it