Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Informatics for FY 2003

Brooks Dawn J, St. Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Informatics for fiscal year 2003. The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. These fellowships provide opportunities for interdisciplinary research and educational activities in biology and informatics to a wide range of recent doctoral recipients. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan is entitled "Introducing evolutionary information to improve detection of remote homologs using profile hidden Markov models." The ability to assign otherwise un-annotated sequences to a protein family often provides the first clue to its function. To improve our ability to distinguish family members from nonmembers, this research introduces evolutionary models and phylogenetic information into the process of building profile hidden Markov models to represent sequence families.