Assistant Professor
Texas A & M HSC College of Medicine
http://vanburenlab.medicine.tamhsc.edu

CV (.pdf)

Title: New Computational Tools for Investigating the Systems Biology of Heart Development

Abstract: Prevention and treatment of congenital cardiovascular defects in the much-anticipated future of personalized medicine will rely on efforts to characterize the systems biology of heart development. We have previously developed a tool that identifies small correlation networks around a gene of interest from publicly available mouse microarray data. This tool, StarNet (http://vanburenlab.tamhsc.edu/starnet.html), uses a "guilt by association" approach to identify groups of genes that are putatively enriched for genes that have a biological interaction with a gene of interest. We have more recently developed a new Web-based interface to a database of known interactions. The database draws known interaction networks from multiple provided gene IDs, and can draw multi-species networks of genes grouped by Homologene IDs. The database has an additional interface for user submissions of interactions. As such, this new interaction database supports all organisms. There is a documented review of submissions, but all submissions go live immediately with a status of 'submitted'. This new resource currently contains interaction data for 20 organisms, including human, chimpanzee, mouse, rat, and dog, with a total of 319418 entries.