Two New NIH-funded Short Courses

CCBS is proud to launch two new three-week short courses in systems biology.  These courses, each supported by five-year grants from the NIH, will be held on the UCI campus, and are open to trainees and established researchers from around the U.S. and abroad. They both include lecture, small-group instruction, and laboratory components, as well as mentoring and networking opportunities.

The two courses will be held concurrently from May 7th-May 25th, 2018.

One is entitled, "Systems Biology, A Foundation for Interdisciplinary Careers". This course covers multiple topics in systems biology, and is targeted both toward individuals with backgrounds in the mathematical, computational or physical sciences as well as individuals with biological or biomedical backgrounds.  The course emphasizes mentoring and skills development for dealing with the unique challenges of following an interdisciplinary career path.

The other course is entitled "Cancer Systems Biology", and is focused on exciting research topics at the intersection between Cancer Biology and Systems Biology.  It is also open to individuals with diverse backgrounds at multiple career stages. 

Registration for both courses will open on February 15th. 

Please click on the course titles or posters above to visit their websites and find out more!

CCBS Annual Retreat 2018

 The 2018 CCBS Annual Retreat will be held at the Omni Hotel in downtown Los Angeles from Friday, March 23rd through Sunday, March 25th, 2018.

The Omni hotel, adjacent to the Museum of Contemporary Art in the Bunker Hill area.  We look forward to an exciting weekend of systems biology discussions and forging new collaborations.

Registration is OPEN and schedule information will be available soon.  For additional information, please contact Karen Martin, kymartin@uci.edu.

News

 Congratulations to Mathematics PhD student Chris Rackauckas!

 10/09/17 - Chris Rackauckas, a Mathematics Department graduate student researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Qing Nie, won the Best Speaker Award for his student talk at the Tsukuba Global Science Week conference, September 24-27, 2017. Chris is also the recipient of a Ford Foundation fellowship and an NSF GRFP fellow.

The title of Chris’ talk was “The Hidden Information in Biological Randomness.”  This talk discussed how randomness (noise/stochasticity) in biological experiments can be used to distinguish between models which are the same in their average behavior, how noise in biological systems can be controlled, and displayed how hindbrain segmentation in the developing zebrafish hindbrain requires a specific amount of noise in order to produce proper development. 

  Congratulations to MCSB PhD student Lara Clemens!

07/31/17 - Lara won an award for best poster in the session "Why Disorder Matters" at the 19th IUPAB (International Union of Pure and Applied Biophysics) Congress and 11th EBSA (European Biophysical Societies' Association) Congress, which took place from July 16-20th, 2017 at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, Edinburgh, UK. Her poster was entitled,  "Intrinsically disordered signaling proteins can exhibit emergent cooperativity, sequential binding." The conference had over 1100 posters and she is one of 35 winners!  

http://www.iupab2017.org/awards

2017 Opportunity Awards

7/18/17

Congratulations to the winners of this year's CCBS Opportunity Awards competition based on the theme of Crossing Scales with Cell-Level Data! Each winning proposal will receive $10,000 to be shared between the faculty for lab project expenses; and a $1,000 award for research supplies to be shared between student and/or postdoctoral participants. We look forward to hearing about the projects at next year's annual CCBS retreat scheduled for Spring quarter 2018, due to be held in the Los Angeles area!

News

New publication from Qing Nie and Maksim Plikus on Rapid Spatiotemporal Hair Growth Patterning

July 11, 2017: Read more about their research in UCI News.
                      Full text of the article may be read on eLife.

Ali Mortazavi to share $10 million in NIH funding for critical genome mapping

With new NIH funding, Ali Mortazavi, UCI assistant professor of developmental & cell biology, will study the structure of all expressed genes using state-of-the-art, long-read sequencing technologies. Steve Zylius / UCI

February 3rd, 2017 - The National Institutes of Health is expanding its effort to create a fundamental genomics resource for scientific use in studying human health and disease. And through its Encyclopedia of DNA Elements Project, UCI assistant professor of developmental & cell biology Ali Mortazavi will share $10 million in grant funding over four years with the California Institute of Technology to establish one of eight mapping centers across the nation to pinpoint where genes and the regulatory elements that control them lie within the genome. With this award, the UCI-Caltech Precision Transcriptome Center will be able to explore the structure of all expressed genes using state-of-the-art, long-read sequencing technologies across a broader diversity of biological samples – including those from individuals with various diseases, as well as highly specialized cells – to expand the catalog of candidate functional elements in the human and mouse genomes.

Mathematician Qing Nie awarded foundation grant to study cancer drug resistance

Qing Nie and fellow researchers received funding from the Jayne Koskinas Ted Giovanis Foundation for Health & Policy and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

January 30th, 2017 - UCI mathematics professor Qing Nie and his collaborators have been awarded $455,000 to study cancer drug resistance by the Jayne Koskinas Ted Giovanis Foundation for Health & Policy and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Along with an interdisciplinary team of experimental cancer biologists, engineers and mathematicians, Nie hopes to identify novel and more effective treatments for patients with breast cancer. Drug resistance is a key impediment to breast cancer therapy. While genetic mechanisms of drug resistance have been a focus of many studies, the ability of a cell to dynamically evade drugs through nongenetic means ­– such as plasticity, an organism’s capacity to adapt to environmental changes – is an often overlooked mechanism for lack of drug efficacy. “Cellular plasticity gives rise to dynamic tumor difference through the generation of distinct subpopulations with diverse properties, including susceptibility to therapy,” Nie said. “We hypothesize that cell state plasticity contributes to drug resistance and that an integrated experimental and modeling approach can be used to identify rational approaches to overcome plasticity-induced resistance.”