Apple Bioinformatics Award Winners

Dr. Christopher Lee

Institution

University of California at Los Angeles

Assignment

Associate Professor, Institute for Genomics and Proteomics, Molecular Biology Institute

Scientific Discipline

Bioinformatics

Challenge

Revising assumptions for phylogeny, alignment and visualization — all crucial for making sense of the human genome.

Discoveries

Showed that alternative splicing, long thought to play a minor role in gene expression, occurs in most human genes, producing over 60,000 different splice forms of the estimated 32,000 human genes.

Research

Dr. Lee explores three new fields that are transforming medical research: genome-wide analysis of alternative splicing, comparative genomics and partial order alignment. Questions include: Do changes in alternative splicing play an important role in causing cancer? How does alternative splicing regulate genome function? Does alternative splicing accelerate genome evolution?

Resources

Dr. Lee and his team of 10 researchers and technicians operate in a UNIX-based lab at UCLA. Before he applied for the cluster award, he had already switched everyone from Windows desktop machines to Mac OS X and PowerBooks, and brought in a dual Xserve G5 with iNquiry bioinformatics software to supplement his own analysis tools.

“With standard chemotherapy approaches, you try to attack the tumor more than you attack the cell. Of course, by attacking the whole gene, you’re also making normal cells quite sick. With alternative splicing, you can target the cancer-specific segment of the gene rather than the whole gene and potentially have much more focused therapies.”

Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics

“Every year, genomics researchers should use 10 times more data to make better discoveries, but average biologists can’t exploit the data without tools that are easy to use and scalable. The Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics provides a great foundation for solving this need. It supports big analyses, and I can add power tools for visualization, integration, interactive data mining and automated query construction.”

Why Apple?

“For a long list of reasons. Fundamentally, having one place that beautifully integrates all the different aspects of my work — from development, rapid prototyping to data anlaysis, visualization, and writing grants and papers — no matter where I am is a dream come true.”