Sites - Brazil
Institute:
The Insituto Oswaldo Cruz (IOC) was founded in 1900 as Brazil's pioneer venture into vaccine production. Since then, the institute has diversified its projects to address the particular public health challenges seen in Brazil today. The institute has 71 laboratories working in research and technological development and innovation, dedicated to the study of genetic and infectious diseases.
Host Investigator:
Dr. Alberto Davila
UC Berkeley Investigator:
Dr. Kimmen Sjölander is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering, Affiliated Professor of Plant and Microbial Biology, and faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her group develops novel computational methods and phylogenetic tools to predict pathogen protein structure and function from genomic data. For example, Dr. Sjölander has been funded by NIH and NSF to build and expand PhyloFacts, an online "protein encyclopedia" providing pre-calculated phylogenetic trees for protein families found in animal genomes. The tool enables analyses of the effects of allelic variation on pathogenicity and host response, for all pathogens with sequenced genomes. Potential student research projects in the group include work on a new extension of PhyloFacts, to provide biochemical pathway identification and analysis tools in a phylogenomic framework. The new tool can be applied to metagenomic studies of environmental datasets.