People, papers and presentations

Wade Adams, senior faculty fellow in materials science and nanoengineering, will speak at the sixth annual International Conference of Environment in Goyang-si, South Korea. The conference, which will be June 30-July 3, aims to bring together innovative academics and industrial experts in environmental science and technology to focus on the core knowledge and major advances in the field.

The animated video “How Does DNA Fold?” by Rice computer science researchers Adrian Sanborn, Suhas Rao and Erez Lieberman Aiden and Baylor College of Medicine’s Najeeb Tarazi won the 2016 Lab Grammy competition for Best Education Video. The winners, all members of the Aiden’s lab at Baylor, created the video last October to accompany the research paper “Chromatin Extrusion Explains Key Features of Loop and Domain Formation in Wild-Type and Engineered Genomes” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The group spent dozens of hours storyboarding, creating animations and recording narration for the three-minute video, which has had more than 9,000 views. Aiden’s team also won the award in 2015 for their stop-motion origami video, “A 3-D Map of the Human Genome.”

A victory by a team of Rice bioengineers was formally acknowledged with the publication of a paper in Nature Methods. With their Biowheel, Amina Qutub, an assistant professor of bioengineering, and her team won a subchallenge of the DREAM 8 competition to develop “big-data” diagnostic tools to analyze protein interactions in breast cancer. Qutub, graduate student Chenyue Wendy Hu, research scientist Byron Long, postdoctoral researcher David Noren and Rice alumnus Alexander Bisberg ’15 are co-authors of the paper; along with Biowheel, the team also contributed a reverse network inference model to identify cancer signaling pathways. Biowheel was selected as the analytical tool for the subsequent DREAM 9, in which researchers were challenged to predict outcomes based on acute myeloid leukemia data. Results are expected to be announced soon.