Natural Blogarithms

This past week marked the beginning of my venture in the wide world of Bioinformatics. As I was looking for work this summer I was searching for just about any area of research where my affinity for new mathematical applications would be satisfied. Somehow, since I became a mathematics researcher I have developed a knack for entering new areas of research as often as my children need new shoes. My master’s work was in scattered data approximation, my doctoral work in finite element methods, last summer I worked for a physical chemist, over the last year I have been developing variable knot spline algorithms and now I am working to learn the field of bioinformatics.

Here is where I work.

This is near where I work and I have no idea what it is or why its there.

So what am I doing? As I keep telling everyone who asks me what I am doing, I am on the steepest part of the learning curve (I hope) so I am just barely learning exactly what it is I am going to do all summer.

As far as I can tell, the first couple of projects that I will be working will involve taking long sequences of genetic data (a list of “letters” A,G,T,C that encode the information of “life”) and comparing them. For example, the primary investigator that I am working for has done significant research in identifying genes in cotton fiber cells. Because of the relative simplicity of the cotton fiber, she has been able to determine which genes encode information about the cell wall. By the way, I will likely sound much more like a computer scientist than a biologist in explaining this. We are going to take the known regions and compare them with other data from other research groups who are working on other plant species such as the Arabidopsis plant or the Poplar tree and help them identify cell wall genes in their genetic data.

Later on, I believe we intend to expand the list of transcription factors for cotton as well as do some research into MicroRNA sequences in cotton data. My boss is more of a laboratory scientist but I have been assured that the only time I might be asked to step into the lab will be to pose for pictures so it looks like they are doing something important. She is very new to the university so most of her lab equipment (and there is a LOT of it) is still in boxes.

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