School of Arts and Sciences Review Winter 2014 | Page 10

A Closer Look

Zhang part of $1.2 million
NSF bioinformatics grant

A

fter four years of coordinated effort and countless
hours of research, the true work has begun as Dr. XiaoNing Zhang, assistant professor of biology at St.
Bonaventure, launches a collaborative bioinformatics
project with colleagues at the University of Maryland and the University of Iowa.
Zhang is part of a team of biologists and computer scientists
awarded a $1.2 million grant from the Division of Advances in Biological Informatics of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a tool that will enhance the workflow and aid in discovery
for biologists. The research team is developing an automated tool
that will create relationship patterns for genes of interest using annotation data from public repositories.
“Our goal is to help
biologists shorten their
Visit us online:
time when looking
www.sbu.edu/Biochemistry
through decades’
worth of literature and
extracting association patterns for the area they are interested in,”
said Zhang. “The tool we are developing relies on The Arabidopsis
Information Resource (TAIR, www.arabidopsis.org), and will help
TAIR become more accurate and abundant.”
Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant in the mustard family, is the first plant species in which genome has been sequenced,
Zhang explained.
There are millions of research papers on Arabidopsis captured in
various repositories. Sifting through the literature to look for interestin