Meeting Professor Benham

Last week I had a meeting with professor Craig Benham, who studies the relationship between structure and function in macromolecules such as DNA. He has joint appointments at the Departments of Mathematics, Bioengineering, and the Center for Bioinformatics. We discussed the importance of DNA topology (in gene regulation specifically) and I have learned more about the methods developed by his group. Altogether, our meeting was very valuable for my research.

University of California system

The University of California (UC) is a public university system in the state of California. It has about 235,000 students enrolled at the campuses Berkeley, San Fransisco, Los Angeles, Davis, Santa Barbara, Irvine, Riverside, San Diego and Merced. UC Davis has about 32, 000 students.
The University of California's campuses boast large numbers of distinguished faculty in almost every field and it is widely regarded as one of the top public university systems in the world. By the Academic Ranking of World Universities, one of its campuses, UC Berkeley, is ranked second worldwide among public and private universities, and three—Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego—are ranked among the top 15.

Robert Mondavi Institute

The Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science (RMI) within the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences of UC Davis was established with a personal gift of $25 million in 2001 from Robert Mondavi, renowned California wine producer. The RMI houses the departments of Viticulture and Enology, and Food Science and Technology, both recognized as the best in the world in their respective areas of scholarship.

Roland left Davis, Lex moved into the lab

Last thursday Roland left Davis and returned to the Netherlands where he will continue with the project. Since our office is kind of empty and isolated now, Lex moved to a desk in the actual wet-lab last week. Working in the lab itself is a good way to get some interactions and to learn what kind of activities are going on in there, since I am right in the center of all the action now. No wet lab activities for me though, I will stick to the bio-informatics.

QUIZ: Davis heat map

What does this heat map represent ?
No cheating, so no Googling !!!

BGI@UCDavis

We spoke with Bart Weimer, a professor in the Department of Population Health and Reproduction in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, who has been appointed co-director of BGI@UCDavis, a partnership between UC Davis and BGI (Beijing Genomics Institute), the world's largest genome sequencing organization. Weimer will be responsible for the day-to-day operations of the center, to be located on UC Davis' Sacramento campus. The center has started sequencing at a small scale but intends to expand significantly in the coming years. One of the ambitious efforts is the 100K Genome project aimed at sequencing the genomes of 100,000 infectious microorganisms to speed diagnosis of foodborne illnesses, which has been launched by UCDavis, Agilent Technologies and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Roland's seminar

Roland gave a seminar on Wednesday Sept. 12 at the Robert Mondavi Institute entitled "Bioinformatics analysis of Lactic Acid Bacteria genomes", attended by about 30 senior scientists, postdocs and students.