Advance health informatics

UC San Diego researchers have pioneered a more accurate approach for predicting the risk of breast cancer metastasis in individual patients and described the technique in Molecular Systems Biology. The researchers took advantage of new protein interaction databases and identified networks of genes from breast cancer patients – rather than individual genes – that can be used to predict whether a breast cancer tumor is likely to spread.
Media contact: Rex Graham, (858) 822-3075, ragraham@ucsd.edu.

Bioengineering researchers at UC San Diego have painstakingly assembled a virtual human metabolic network that will give researchers a new way to hunt for better treatments for hundreds of human metabolic disorders, from diabetes to high levels of cholesterol in the blood. This first-of-its-kind metabolic network builds on the sequencing of the human genome and contains more than 3,300 known human biochemical transformations that have been documented during 50 years of research worldwide.
Media contact: Rex Graham, (858) 822-3075, ragraham@ucsd.edu.

Shankar Subramaniam, a professor in the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCSD and director of the Bioinformatics Graduate Program, has co-authored the first comprehensive book on neuroinformatics. The extensively illustrated book covers everything from relevant computational science and modeling issues to their diverse applications. Databasing the Brain: From Data to Knowledge (Neuroinformatics) is devoted to an emerging interdisciplinary field that integrates neuroscience with informatics to create unique databases and analytical tools. Neuroinformatics is making use of a large variety of data types, applying them to brain research, and linking them with databases within both neuroscience and other fields, such as genomics and proteomics.
Media contact: Rex Graham, (858) 822-3075, ragraham@ucsd.edu

One gene for pea pod color generates green pods while a variant of that gene gives rise to the yellow-pod phenotype, a feature that helped Gregor Mendel, the 19th century Austrian priest and scientist, first describe genetic inheritance. However, many modern-day geneticists are focused on the strange ability of some genes to be expressed spontaneously in either of two possible ways. The phenomenon is called epigenetic multistability, a major complication for Mendelian genetics.
Media contact: Rex Graham, (858) 822-3075, ragraham@ucsd.edu