NSF awards Baskin Engineering graduate student Andrew Uzilov prestigious graduate research fellowship

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Andrew V. Uzilov, a second-year graduate student in the Bioinformatics Ph.D. program at the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, received the prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation to explore unusual microbes.  The highly-competitive three-year fellowship will support Andrew in his design and application of probabilistic algorithms to discover novel biology.  Resulting discoveries will be aided and validated by high-throughput experiments using next-generation DNA and RNA sequencing technologies.  They will advance the understanding of the most ancient molecular machines.

One amazing quality of life is that it tends to thrive even in the most
unlikely places.  For example, inhospitable, harsh environments are not a deterrent to the microbes studied in Associate Professor Todd Lowe's lab, where Andrew does his research.  Boiling hot springs, acid baths, very high salt levels -- all of these can be found teeming with life.  One cannot help but wonder: how does anything survive in such hostile conditions?

The Lowe lab explores extremophiles, which are species that live in extreme environments, specifically in the Archaea domain of life.  This domain shares a great deal of core cellular machinery with Eukarya, the domain in which animals, plants, and fungi reside.  Both domains are thought to have descended from a common ancestor a long time ago.  Therefore, studying archaeal cellular machinery can provide insights into the biology of many species, even human.