Announcing the Recipients of the NextBio Travel Grant!

We are very pleased to announce the recipients of the NextBio travel grant!

We received numerous outstanding essays and it was quite difficult to select just three winners. After much deliberation the following students were selected:

 

Bryan Dickinson

Laura Mariani

Khader Shameer

 

Bryan is a chemistry graduate student at the University of California Berkeley who studies neural stem cells and is interested in NADPH-oxidase (NOX) proteins. Bryan’s essay describes how he used NextBio to find relevant information in the publicly available experimental data.

After a few clicks I was able to find array data on multiple types of stem cells under both growth and differentiation conditions and the expression changes in my NOX proteins. When I read the original research articles that the data supported, I was surprised to see that NOX proteins were not even mentioned.”

 

Bryan goes on to say:

…NextBio has allowed me to quickly and easily find information about my project that not only saved me the time and effort to screen lysates for the various isoforms of the proteins I am looking for, but also saved my lab money since we did not need to purchase as many antibodies. I have since confirmed by western blotting the presence of the proteins that the data NextBio mined for me during that original search suggested should be present in my neural stem cells. I am now in the process of confirming the expression level changes also suggested by the array data during both stress and differentiation conditions.”

 

We were thrilled to hear that NextBio made Bryan’s research more efficient!

 

Laura is a first year PhD student in neuroscience at Emory University who used NextBio to help her in studying Parkinson’s Disease (PD). In her essay, Laura discusses how NextBio helped her sort through a massive amount of public data.

When I entered my gene of interest – coding for the relevant protein – into NextBio, pages of information appeared about its expression in a range of tissues and its role in different human diseases. After sorting the search results by disease, I immediately discovered two recent studies on gene expression in PD that involved this gene. When I viewed the articles cited, I was unable to find any reference to the gene in the text, but saw that the Affymetrix GeneChip data associated with each study had been published to NCBI’s Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database. I hadn’t heard of this database before, but even if I had, I could not have found the most relevant papers so quickly on my own (a GEO search for this gene returns an astonishing 2,000 results!).”

Khader is a computational biology PhD student at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in India who works on sequence and structure analysis of proteins. Khader’s essay details how NextBio literature search helps him with his research.

As part of my work, many times my hit lists will throw me a set of new proteins for which I have to identify interesting functional aspects. I always require extensive manual literature curation to obtain detailed aspects by going through multiple papers and cross-reference with related literature. Using NEXTBIO, literature curation is a unique learning experience; it provides an annotated version of PubMed abstracts with interesting tool tips for organisms, genes, proteins, small molecule, disease type etc. This is a very useful utility that will provide a perfect understanding of the abstract by providing the apt information as context dependent dynamic tool tips.”

 

The full texts of the winning essays are available here. They are great essays and I hope you take a few minutes to click through and read them.

All of the essays submitted to the travel grant were well-written and I wish we could have given out grants to every applicant. On behalf of the entire NextBio team, please allow me to offer our sincere thanks to all those who applied and to everyone who helped us to spread the word about the grant.