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DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTATIONAL TOOLS FOR OPTIMAL IDENTIFICATION OF BIOLOGICAL NETWORKS
Impact/Purpose:
The Research Center will bring together a team of computational scientists, with diverse backgrounds in bioinformatics, cheminformatics and enviroinformatics, from UMDNJ, Rutgers, and Princeton Universities, and the USFDA’s Center for Toxicoinformatics. This team will address, in a systematic and integrative manner, multiple elements of the toxicant Source-to-Outcome sequence ( Investigational Area 1, as identified in the RFA) as well as develop cheminformatics tools for toxicant characterization ( Investigational Area 2, Predictive Models for Hazard Identification ). The computational tools to be developed through this effort will be extensively evaluated and refined through collaborative applications involving Center scientists as well as colleagues from the three universities and USEPA; particular emphasis will be on methods that enhance current quantitative risk assessment practices and reduce uncertainties.
Description:
Following the theoretical analysis and computer simulations, the next step for the development of SNIP will be a proof-of-principle laboratory application. Specifically, we have obtained a synthetic transcriptional cascade (harbored in Escherichia coli) containing two chemical inputs and one output (quantified by bicistronic fluorescent proteins) connected by nonlinear regulatory interactions. The goal is to see if SNIP can recover the nonlinear, cooperative input-output relationships and enable predictive power.