Shedding Light on Melanoma Cells’ Response to Chemotherapy

In a study recently published in Nature Communications, scientists from the Moffitt Cancer Center, in collaboration with the UF Health Cancer Center (UFHCC) and the Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research (ICBR) at the University of Florida, have shed light on a pivotal mechanism regarding melanoma cells’ response to stress induced by chemotherapy agents.

One of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Richard L. Bennett, highlighted the significance of their findings, stating, “We discovered that melanoma cells become a different cell type after being exposed to stresses such as chemotherapy agents that leads to melanoma brain metastasis. Basically, this is a mechanism that melanoma cells use to ‘survive’ chemotherapy – they turn into a different cell type.”

Dr. Alberto Riva, Scientific Director of the ICBR Bioinformatics Core, played an important role in the analysis phase of this study, employing his expertise in ATAC-Seq, ChIP-Seq, and RNA-Seq analysis techniques. ATAC-Seq and ChIP-Seq can identify epigenetic marks and provide information on genome-wide gene regulation that complements the results of RNA-Seq experiments. This combined strategy provides powerful insight into how genome organization and regulation contribute to the strategies melanoma cells use to adapt to chemotherapy.

This study, that can potentially help develop new therapies for melanoma, highlights the importance of a collaborative approach to biomedical research, involving scientists from different institutions working in concert with research support organizations like ICBR and its Bioinformatics core.

For more details about this study, visit https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43519-1

Signaling Molecules Help Plants Fight Microbes – ICBR Scientists Contribute to Groundbreaking Research

Scientists from the University of Florida Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research (ICBR) have made a significant contribution to a study published in the journal Nature Communications that advances our understanding of plant immune response. The research study was led by Dr. Zhonglin Mou in the UF Molecular and Cell Sciences Department and Dr. Shweta Chhajed in the UF Department of Biology. Dr. Yanping Zhang, Scientific Director of Gene Expression & Genotyping, and Dr. Fahong Yu, Bioinformatics Scientist, played pivotal roles in this groundbreaking research.

The publication is entitled N-hydroxypipecolic acid triggers systemic acquired resistance through extracellular NAD(P) and focuses on systemic acquired resistance (SAR), a critical plant defense mechanism. Unlike animals, plants cannot rely on mobile innate immune cells or adaptive immunity. Instead, they employ SAR, a long-lasting, broad-spectrum defense activated in tissues distant from the initial infection site. This response is triggered by mobile signals from the primary infection zone. However, the specific details of this signaling cascade in initiating downstream SAR signaling was previously unclear. This study sheds light on this mystery by identifying key signaling molecules. These molecules facilitate chemical communication between locally infected cells and distal tissues that is crucial in mounting the SAR response.

Data generated by ICBR scientists and co-authors Dr. Yanping Zhang (Gene Expression) and Dr. Fahong Yu (Bioinformatics) contributed to the findings presented in this report. Their contributions provide deeper insights into the SAR mechanism in plants, enhancing our understanding of plant immune responses at the molecular level.

This publication not only emphasizes the University of Florida’s role in leading botanical research but also highlights the significance of interdisciplinary collaboration in scientific advancements.

For more details about this study, visit https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-42629-0

Dr. Alberto Riva at ISMB/ECCB2023: Advancing Bioinformatics Cores and Inspiring Collaboration

Audience at the BioInfo Core Session at ISMB 2023

Dr. Alberto Riva at ISMB/ECCB2023: Advancing Bioinformatics Cores and Inspiring Collaboration

Dr. Alberto Riva, the Scientific Director for the ICBR Bioinformatics core, recently attended the highly acclaimed Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference, renowned as the largest and most prestigious gathering in the field of computational biology and bioinformatics. This year’s conference, held in Lyon, France in partnership with the European Conference on Computational Biology (EECB), drew over 2,000 attendees from around the globe, and included 9 tracks with 500 talks and 1200 posters over five days.

Dr. Riva was one of the organizers of the BioInfo-Core workshop, which focused on addressing pertinent issues related to Bioinformatics Cores. During the BioInfo-Core workshop, Dr. Riva moderated a panel discussion on spatial transcriptomics, an emerging field combines high-throughput sequencing and spatial imaging techniques to elucidate the spatial organization of gene expression within tissues. Additionally, the workshop included a keynote presentation by Dr James McCafferty, CIO of the Welcome Sanger Institute, several lightning talks, which offered researchers an opportunity to present their work within a condensed timeframe, and group discussions on topics of interest to the bioinformatics community.

Scientific expedition to study human impact on Florida Everglades

A team of five that includes a female University of Florida professor as its lead scientist will embark Thursday on a dangerous trek across the Florida Everglades to assess the impact of humans on the world’s largest subtropical wilderness. The group will retrace an 1897 canoe journey that was first completed by explorer and scientist Hugh de Laussat Willoughby.

Tracie Baker, an associate professor of environmental and global health in the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions, has joined the team of experienced explorers and guides in a mission to sample and test for the same water constituents that Willoughby did more than a century ago. Willoughby’s charts aided in creating the first accurate maps of the region, and his water sampling provided the baseline water chemistry for the Everglades.

“This expedition is primarily focused on applying modern scientific investigations to one of the planet’s most important watersheds. However, we also hope to inspire future generations of scientists, explorers and all citizens to be better stewards of our shared environment,” said Baker, a member of the UF Water Institute. “My work focuses on multidisciplinary research that seeks to bridge and improve human, animal and environmental health. The Willoughby Expedition will provide critical primary research into that work.”

UF professor working with a student in the field on water samples

To gauge humanity’s impact on the Florida Everglades, a UNESCO Wetland Area of Global Importance, the 2022 Willoughby Expedition team will also look for water pollutants that Willoughby couldn’t have foreseen, including microplastics, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), pesticides, pharmaceuticals and antibiotic-resistant genes, all of which are adversely affecting plant and animal species globally. To help conserve wildlife, the expedition team will also document the abundance and location of apple snails, which are the sole food source of the federally endangered snail kite, a bird of prey.

/// Tracie Baker, Ph.D. ///

is a user in ICBR’s NextGen DNA Sequencing, Bioinformatics and Gene Expression & Genotyping cores

Heatstroke’s long-term damage to the body

Eric Hamilton

This summer, huge swaths of the U.S. have already faced record-breaking heat waves. Heat kills more people than any other extreme weather event, and deadly heat waves are getting longer and hotter as the climate warms.

Staying cool – and informed – is essential. So we spoke with Thomas Clanton, a professor of applied physiology and kinesiology at the University of Florida and an expert in the effects of heat on the body, about how to recognize heat illness and the long-term consequences of this kind of stress.

Heatstroke is a medical emergency. If you notice signs of heatstroke in a person, call 911 immediately.

A picture of Thomas Clanton — Thomas Clanton

What is heat illness?

It’s a really broad spectrum. At the lowest end is heat exhaustion, and on the more extreme end we have heatstroke. The difference is really the presence of neurological symptoms in heatstroke. Throughout the spectrum, mild to severe injury to liver, heart, kidney and muscle can be present. So, you can have heat exhaustion and you’re probably still thinking pretty well, but you know you’re hot. You try to get out of the heat and you’re functional. However, heatstroke victims can go unconscious, lose motor control or become delirious, so their ability to respond is limited.

Clinically, a person would be diagnosed with heatstroke if they have a temperature above 40 degrees centigrade (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and also exhibit central nervous system symptoms.

What are some of the signs that someone needs to cool down?

Other signs that people notice include pallor (paleness) of the skin. Whereas profuse sweating is a normal reaction to heat, at the extremes of heatstroke the sweat response doesn’t work as well, and the skin can become dry. If you begin to notice these signs, get into the shade, drink plenty of water and move to a reclined position. If ice bags or wet towels are available, place them under the arms, on the neck and along the groin regions. If any unusual neurological symptoms develop, get medical assistance immediately.

A lot of times people in the “heat exhaustion” range may not know they are getting heat illness. I think that’s one of the concepts worth emphasizing. Besides just feeling hot, an individual may feel a little “woozy” or just “not themselves.” When this occurs, and they are not well hydrated, they can move quickly…read more

/// Thomas Clanton, Ph.D. ///

is a user in ICBR’s NextGen DNA Sequencing, Cytometry, Gene Expression & Genotyping and Bioinformatics cores

SynGatorTron™ to speed medical research, alleviate privacy worries

from UF Health

“Dr. Chatbot will see you now.”

The next generation of super-smart computers, tablets and cell phones may come equipped with artificial intelligence-generated medical chatbots that can interact with patients using human language and medical knowledge.

According to Yonghui Wu, Ph.D., director of natural language processing at the University of Florida Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the medical chatbot you interact with online will be able to use conversational language to communicate with and educate patients in much the same way we now interact with Apple’s chatbot, Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa.

The chatbot may also be culturally sensitive and matched to your age.

“It will be like having your own personal medical avatar,” Wu said.

Medical chatbots are just one of many possible applications to arise out of groundbreaking new AI tools developed by Wu and other researchers at UF and NVIDIA as part of a $100 million artificial intelligence public-private collaboration formed in 2020. Last year, they launched a clinical language AI model, GatorTron™. This AI tool enables computers to quickly access, read and interpret medical language in clinical notes and other unstructured narratives stored in real-world electronic health records. The model was trained on HiPerGator-AI, the university’s NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system, which ranks among the world’s top 30 supercomputers.

The GatorTron™ model is expected to accelerate research and medical decision-making by extracting information and insights from massive amounts of clinical data with unprecedented speed and clarity. It will also lead to innovative AI tools and advanced, data-driven health research methods that were unimaginable even 10 or 15 years ago.

This year, the team is rolling out another model – SynGatorTron™ — with different capabilities. SynGatorTron™ can generate synthetic patient data untraceable to real patients. This synthetic data can then be used to train the next generation of medical AI systems to understand conversational language and medical terminology.

Most data-driven health research and health-related AI applications today rely on ‘de-identified’ patient data in electronic health records, from which patients’ private information such as name, address and birthdate, has been removed before it is used for research and development.

Removing patient data is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Automated de-identification systems can be used to generate large-scale machine de-identified data, but it’s not an ironclad solution.

According to Wu, even after all identifying patient information has been removed, there’s still a remote chance that someone could identify a patient by tracking data over time.

“Generating synthetic patient data is a safe way to preserve the knowledge of medical language but mitigate the risks of patient privacy,” Wu said.

Patient privacy isn’t the only barrier to training the next generation of AI models for research and other applications. The sheer volume of data required to train AI models can also stand in the way.

“There’s a finite amount of patient data available to us, and training AI computer models requires a tremendous amount of data,” said Duane Mitchell, M.D., Ph.D., director of the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute and associate dean for clinical and translational sciences at the UF College of Medicine. “With SynGatorTron™, we can generate all the data we need.”

/// Read Full Article ///

Dr. Duane Mitchell is user in ICBR’s Bioinformatics, Cytometry, Electron Microscopy, Monoclonal Antibody, NextGen DNA Sequencing, Proteomics & Mass Spectrometry and Gene Expression & Genotyping core

Soltis named 2021-2022 Teacher/Scholar of the Year

from UF News

by Blake Trauschke

Pamela S. Soltis, a distinguished professor and curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, has been selected as the 2021-2022 University of Florida Teacher/Scholar of the Year.

UF’s most prestigious and oldest faculty award, the recognition offers an honorarium of $6,000 in addition to other acknowledgements. In selecting the winner, the Award Committee chooses a faculty member who demonstrates distinguished achievement in both teaching and scholarly activity as evidenced through scholarly research, creative writing, original works of art, etc., and visibility within and beyond the university.

Soltis, director of the UF Biodiversity Institute, is a botanist whose principal research focuses on plant diversity and evolution. She is widely known for her recognition of the importance of polyploidy — having more than two sets of chromosomes — evolution in flowering and seed plants. She joined UF in 2000.

She has more than 400 scientific publications, authored and edited nine books, and served as president for three scientific societies.

Soltis was a nominee for the National Medal of Science and won the Southeastern Universities Research Association’s 2018 Distinguished Scientist Award. Alongside her husband, Doug Soltis, who is also a distinguished professor at the university, Pam Soltis co-won the 2002 Dahlgren Prize in Botany from the Royal Physiographic Society of Sweden, the 2006 Asa Gray Award from the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the 2010 Award of Merit from the Botanical Society of America, and the 2016 Darwin-Wallace Medal by the Linnean Society of London.

/// Read Full Article ///

Dr. Pam Soltis is a user in ICBR’s Cytometry, Monoclonal Antibody, NextGen DNA Sequencing and Gene Expression & Genotyping core.

New COVID test can quickly detect variants

from UF News

University of Florida researchers have invented a test that can determine within 10-15 minutes whether patients test positive for COVID and, if so, which of the five known variants of concern they have.

The research, published Saturday in The Lancet’s eBioMedicine, involves the use of a simple heating device and a cellphone. The team also used a new form of CRISPR — a means of finding and targeting a specific section of genetic material inside a cell — to quickly and effectively diagnose COVID and learn which variant of concern is in a patient sample: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, or omicron.

The finding could provide policymakers with vital information about when to require masking and prepare hospitals for a wave of infections. It could also allow patients and family members to prevent or treat a particular variant more effectively.

“For the medical and research community, knowing which variants are emerging is extremely important,” said corresponding author Piyush Jain, an assistant professor and a Shah Rising Star Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering. “If an especially serious variant like delta or a genetically similar variant, such as deltacron, arises in the future, work like this discovery will help us track it earlier.”

The team, including professors Marco Salemi, Rhoel Dinglasan, John Lednicky and their lab members from the Emerging Pathogens Institute, made the findings in collaboration with two bioscience engineering companies registered in the Czech Republic. The companies helped the researchers engineer a prototype that could function at home, in a clinic, or in the field.

Current processes for determining COVID variants take several days to perform, which is why patients typically don’t learn which variant they have.

Advancing on recently published work, including by Long Nguyen, a PhD candidate and the first author of the study, the UF team is the first to investigate the new heat-loving CRISPR technology, which manages to combine speed, accuracy, and variant identification by amplifying and detecting coronavirus genetic material in one step.

/// Read Full Article ///

Dr. Piyush Jain is a user in ICBR’s Cytometry and Monoclonal Antibody cores.

Dr. Rhoel Dinglasan is a user in ICBR’s Cytometry, Electron Microscopy, Monoclonal Antibody, NextGen DNA Sequencing, and Gene Expression & Genotyping cores.

Bioinformatics | News

NEWS FEED

Shedding Light on Melanoma Cells’ Response to Chemotherapy

Signaling Molecules Help Plants Fight Microbes – ICBR Scientists Contribute to Groundbreaking Research

Audience at the BioInfo Core Session at ISMB 2023

Dr. Alberto Riva at ISMB/ECCB2023: Advancing Bioinformatics Cores and Inspiring Collaboration

Scientific expedition to study human impact on Florida Everglades

/// Tracie Baker, Ph.D. ///

is a user in ICBR’s NextGen DNA Sequencing, Bioinformatics and Gene Expression & Genotyping cores

Heatstroke’s long-term damage to the body

Eric Hamilton

What is heat illness?

What are some of the signs that someone needs to cool down?

/// Thomas Clanton, Ph.D. ///

is a user in ICBR’s NextGen DNA Sequencing, Cytometry, Gene Expression & Genotyping and Bioinformatics cores

Dr. Duane Mitchell is user in ICBR’s Bioinformatics, Cytometry, Electron Microscopy, Monoclonal Antibody, NextGen DNA Sequencing, Proteomics & Mass Spectrometry and Gene Expression & Genotyping core

Soltis named 2021-2022 Teacher/Scholar of the Year

by Blake Trauschke

Dr. Pam Soltis is a user in ICBR’s Cytometry, Monoclonal Antibody, NextGen DNA Sequencing and Gene Expression & Genotyping core.

New COVID test can quickly detect variants

Dr. Piyush Jain is a user in ICBR’s Cytometry and Monoclonal Antibody cores.

Dr. Rhoel Dinglasan is a user in ICBR’s Cytometry, Electron Microscopy, Monoclonal Antibody, NextGen DNA Sequencing, and Gene Expression & Genotyping cores.

Dr. Marco Salemi is a user in ICBR’s Bioinformatics, Cytometry, NextGen DNA Sequencing and Gene Expression & Genotyping cores.

Dr. John Lednicky is a current user in UF | ICBR’s Electron Microscopy and Gene Expression & Genotyping cores.

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