News Release

NIH grant advances evolutionary studies at University of Idaho

Grant and Award Announcement

University of Idaho

UI research group lands $10.2 million NIH grant to apply biology, computers to evolutionary biology

MOSCOW, Idaho -- The University of Idaho's growing expertise in evolutionary biology and use of computer science and mathematics in the field has drawn a new $10.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

A new UI Center for Research on Processes in Evolution will focus on the evolution of drug resistance in microbes and determining how specific viruses choose their hosts.

This most recent NIH Center of Biomedical Research Excellence at UI represents the largest single research grant in the university's history. It follows a similar center established in 2000 to study infectious diseases that won a $9.6 million grant, which previously ranked as the UI's largest. Last fall, Boise State University, Idaho State University and UI researchers won another $6 million NIH Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network grant.

"These three grants show that Idaho researchers and educators are doing leading-edge research and are making significant contributions to solving important scientific problems," said UI President Robert A. Hoover.

"All three of these major research programs required the universities to make significant investments in faculty time and building space. In return, Idaho students will benefit and the state's economy will reap direct returns of $25.8 million on those investments," Hoover added.

"We intend to leverage these successes, and there are more to come, to continue to expand Idaho's research and education capabilities," Hoover said. The UI strategic plan calls for adding undergraduate research opportunities to better equip students for the workforce of the future. The plan also sets a goal for UI to be ranked among the top 100 research universities in the nation.

Larry Forney, UI Biological Sciences Department head, will direct the Center for Research on Processes and Evolution. The research proposal assembles biologists, computer scientists and mathematicians into a team that is unrivaled elsewhere, Forney said.

In the late 20th Century, Forney noted, two fields of science have progressed at dazzling speed: computation and biomedicine. Biomedical researchers increasingly turn to computer science and computational biology to interpret their findings.

The new NIH-funded center and a UI commitment to recruit scientists whose work focuses on evolutionary processes have transformed the school into a leading research center.

The research will help to identify patterns in the outcome of evolution and constraints on evolution. That understanding could help show how nature works. More importantly, it could reveal future possibilities, including forecasting future threats posed by diseases and likely results of treatments.

"This will help us to focus our efforts in an area where we know we can contribute at the national and international level," Forney said.

The three major NIH grants are funded by the Institutional Development Award (IDeA) program. It is the NIH equivalent to the long-established Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) funded by the National Science Foundation for more than 20 years.

The EPSCoR program is coordinated by a committee of academic, business and government representatives from throughout Idaho that is chaired by Post Falls businessman Doyle Jacklin.

A $9 million grant through the NSF program began Feb. 1 and will be shared by UI, BSU and ISU researchers.

The new COBRE project will include 11 UI faculty and staff members and two colleagues from the University of Texas and Great Britain's University of Birmingham.

Forney and UI zoologist Holly Wichman have studied evolution of bacteria and a virus under laboratory conditions. They found the microbes evolve new traits in ways that can be predicted and repeated.

Other project leaders include Eva Top, a UI research associate professor, and Gary Daughdrill, an assistant professor of microbiology, molecular biology and biochemistry. Top will study plasmids, or independent blocks of DNA, that can move from cell to cell and transfer drug resistance or other traits. Daugdrill studies proteins and their structure.

Bioinformatics will be the other major focus of the center. It is the marriage of biology, computer science and mathematics.

All of the UI researchers are members of an informal interdisciplinary group, the Initiative for Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Studies (IBEST). "The nucleus of this organization is IBEST," Forney said.

"These are people who really do get along. They are computer scientists who speak enough biology and biologists who see the value of computer science and mathematics. They can really have a dialogue," Forney said. "This group is destined to do important things.".

James Foster, professor of computer science, was a founding member of the group. He also was part of the three-university project that won $6 million from NIH to establish a Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network last fall.

Foster and fellow UI computer scientist Robert Heckendorn won a National Science Foundation grant two years ago that allowed students to build a Beowulf supercomputer on the Moscow campus by linking 60 individual computers together.

Math professors Paul Joyce and Steven Krone will help the computer scientists interpret the information gathered by the biologists.

In modern biology, Forney said, the amount of data now available can easily overwhelm scientists' ability to understand it. "We need to use supercomputers and advanced mathematical analysis to see the patterns that tell us what is happening."

Other UI researchers and staff on the new center's staff include Terence Soule, an assistant professor of computer science, Jack Sullivan, an assistant professor of zoology, and Charles Passavant, Molecular Biology Core Facility director.

James Bull of the University of Texas and Christopher Thomas of the UK's University of Birmingham are also key personnel in the new center.

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Contacts:

Larry Forney, Department of Biological Sciences head, (208) 885-6280, lforney@uidaho.edu;
or Bill Loftus, UI science writer, (208) 885-7694, bloftus@uidaho.edu


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