University Park, Pennsylvania (PRWEB) August 26, 2014 The breakthrough of sequencing the human genome created a need for professionals with backgrounds in life and computer sciences to analyze vast amounts of biological data for developing gene-based drugs and treatments. In response, Penn State World Campus is offering a new graduate certificate in applied bioinformatics that will train a new generation of biomedical researchers in computational thinking and procedures. These skills will allow them to apply algorithmic processes, tools and techniques to their data for a deeper understanding of biological processes. Faculty from the Penn State Eberly College of Science will teach the 11-credit certificate program. This field is really poised to grow and impact society as a whole, said Istvan Albert, associate professor of bioinformatics, biochemistry and molecular biology and the lead faculty member for the certificate program. I think were only at the beginning of understanding how cellular activity works, and the best is yet to come. What life scientists currently need the most is the availability of training that imparts the know-how and practical knowledge that can be put to immediate use in biomedical labs that rely on sequencing technologies. Applications are now being accepted for enrollment in … Continue reading →

Michael Stitzel joked that his research has led him to climb up the evolutionary tree. As an undergraduate he worked with yeast, and over the years, he has worked his way up to studying Drosophila, C. elegans, and, now, people. Stitzel shifted from the more basic roots of the tree to the biomedical limbs as a matter of motivation. He said that as a graduate student, though he worked on an important and interesting question, when experiments didn't go well, it was hard for him to get motivated. And so, he found himself drawn to questions with more direct relevance to medicine. He turned to studying type 2 diabetes. Using a genome-wide association study approach, he identified a number of regions in the genome linked to the disease, but many of them were, as he put it, "in the middle of nowhere." This led him to thinking about epigenetics, and then to later uncover what he and his colleagues dubbed 'stretch enhancers,' longer-than-average enhancers that appear to be driving physiological functions. Read more here: ABRF Assesses NGS Platforms, Library Prep, Bioinformatics in Effort to Create RNA-seq Standards … Continue reading →