Congratulations to Dr. Mónica Orellana and Dr. Nitin Baliga on their new grant for $1.8 million from the National Science Foundation. The project title is “Ocean Acidification: A Systems Biology Approach to Characterize Diatom Response to Ocean Acidification and Climate Change.” Abstract from the proposal: Diatoms account for approximately 40 percent of primary production in the world’s oceans and are the most productive marine phytoplankton group. They form the basis…
Here’s a piece adapted from Michael Pollan’s latest book “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation” which discusses how processed foods and the modern diet have made us more obese and more likely to get sick. He makes a case for eating more fermented foods that haven’t been pasteurized – probiotics, live-culture foods – in order to get the good bacteria back in our guts. At ISB, the microbiome is an…
ISB held a panel discussion at Town Hall to discuss the complexity of the brain. It was a thought-provoking evening that attracted about 200 attendees. If you can’t see the embedded video, click on this link: Town Hall video Read Karlyn Beer’s column in Xconomy on why systems biology is necessary for tackling the complexity of the brain. RELATED: ISB’s International Symposium: Systems Biology and the Brain info
What You Saw in the News: 2012 was the year of the microbiome. Feature stories about the trillions of microbes found in our environment and on/in human bodies appeared in publications such as The Economist, the New York Times, The Scientist, The New Yorker, Wired, Scientific American, and Discover. The NIH’s Human Microbiome Project published a report in Nature. The Earth Microbiome Project held its first international conference, which took…
On Nov. 1, ISB and San Diego-based Sapphire Energy announced a strategic partnership to apply systems biology to algae with the goal of significantly increasing oil yield and improving resistance to crop predators and environmental factors in order to further the advancement of commercialized algae biofuel production. “Together, we have complementary expertise that will allow us to understand, reverse engineer and rationally alter the gene networks for fuel production in…
In June, Dr. Nitin Baliga, ISB’s director for integrative biology, was presented with the 2012 Alvin J. Thompson Award for his significant contributions to bringing systems science education to high schools throughout Washington State and beyond. In August, Zhihao Tan and Michelle Hays, members of the Aimée Dudley group, took first place in the graduate student poster competition at the Genetics Society of America’s Yeast Genetics and Molecular Biology Meeting…
