Washington University in St. Louis leads group studying agi...( ll extend to St. Louis area high school...)

ll extend to St. Louis area high schools via the Washington University Science Outreach program, which keeps K-12 teachers and students up to date in science and engineering trends. Undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral researchers will get hands-on experiences with the "New Biology," which today is comprised of a good dose of mathematical, statistical and computational skills.

"Associated with this approach is a huge deluge of data," Pakrasi explained. "Few biologists today are prepared to handle that, yet we can't escape it. We give our students lots of biology and chemistry, but in most instances our biology students are not taking that much math or statistics. In the future our students will have to learn these areas. The FIBR grant provides excellent opportunities to embark into this new frontier."

"They don't know biology, and we don't know the computational tools they use, so now we'll bring them together," Pakrasi said, of collaborating with engineers. "We've learned from before our planning grant experience that there are many talented people in engineering who want to know biology, and vice versa with biologists. It's a big challenge, but the novelty is a lot of fun." Pakrasi said the first move will be to model the system in cyanobacteria and then extend it to plants to see how much of the system has been conserved.

"Whatever knowledge we gain from plants may well transcend plant biology to human biology," said Pakrasi. "Plants make all sorts of vitamins, the antioxidant ones, A and E, to protect themselves against oxidants. We will extend what we find to all aspects of cell function. The proteins and enzymes in these protective pathways already are drawing interest from drug companies as targets for new therapies."

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Contact: Tony Fitzpatrick
tony_fitzpatrick@wustl.edu
314-935-5272
Washington University in St. Louis
16-Sep-2004

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