Bioinformatics Tools for the Analysis of the Spatiotemporal Organization of Protein Expression in Neural Functional Units

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

The University of California at San Diego has received a grant to develop computational tools to support the study of the development and repair of nervous system development at the molecular level. Knowledge of the tissue distribution of essential molecules is necessary for understanding how biological systems function, how they grow, and how they repair themselves following trauma or disease. In this project, a multidisciplinary team of investigators will design, test and implement new tools to analyze data obtained by means of the recently developed technique of mass spectrometry imaging applied to the mapping of peptides and proteins in biological tissues. Application of these new methods will yield detailed maps of the temporal and spatial distributions of thousands of individual molecules and the capacity to examine patterns of expression as well as correlations in expression within ensembles of molecules. These new methods will be developed and tested first in simple model organisms, to characterize and compare the molecular components in the embryonic, adult and regenerating nervous system. Later, they will be applied in studies of mammalian nervous system slices in order to answer, among other questions, how stem cells are intercalated into and how they mature in adult nervous systems, during normal replacement or artificial replacement following cell loss due to disease or aging. All computational and bioinformatic tools developed in the course of this project will be made available openly to other scientists. The project will train a group of scientists at multiple levels, from undergraduates to postdoctoral fellows, in this exciting new area of basic and applied research. Addiitonal information may be found at http://genomes.ucsd.edu/leechmaster/.