Read our August 2023 newsletter here!
Students and young science faculty from all around Maine converged on MDI Bio Lab’s campus this month for an intensive 10-day course in the use of the most modern microscopy of the day.
“When I started out I thought I knew all about microscopes: you adjust the lens, you look through light. And you see,” says Seth Ashby, a rising junior studying microbiology at UMaine Orono. “But what I didn’t realize, and almost every student I think would agree with this, is how little we actually knew about microscopy.”
That knowledge gap was amply filled, Ashby says, by the daily lectures and ...
The NIGMS is offering free access to their new Sandbox platform through Maine INBRE. Access includes 12 analysis training modules in different -omics areas, image analysis and data science, as well as access to the computational infrastructure to complete the training.
Contact Bioinformatics Core Co-Director Joel Graber (gro.lbidmnull@rebargj) ASAP to apply for a slot!
NIH/NIGMS Cloud Learning Modules. This repository aims to teach students, researchers, and clinicians, among others, how to utilize the power of cloud technology for the benefit of life sciences applications and research. Types of data used across the modules include but are not limited to genomics, methylomics, transcriptomics, ...
Former Maine INBRE project leader Dr. Timothy Breton (University of Maine at Farmington) has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to support studies that are a continuation of his INBRE-funded research. The $551,559 project is jointly funded by the Physiological Mechanisms and Biomechanics Program of BIO-Integrative Organismal Systems and the Established Program to Support Competitive Research (EPSCoR) at NSF.
“This work directly stemmed from my prior INBRE award and is a continuation of the project”, said Dr. Breton. “(The award) is in no small part thanks to the INBRE awards and support for UMaine Farmington that served as the ...
Colby College graduate Laura Drepanos (B.A., 2023, Computational Biology) is the first author of a paper recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, describing findings from her undergraduate research. The article, Loss of Krüppel-like factor 9 deregulates both physiological gene expression and development, presents research related to the function of a biomedically important, stress responsive transcription factor, Krüppel-like factor 9 (Klf9). Drepanos’ participation in Colby’s January 2021 INBRE short course on RNA-seq data analysis sparked an interest in independent research. She was awarded an INBRE undergraduate research fellowship during the summer of 2021, during which she was co-mentored by Drs. ...
University of Maine-Farmington student William Harriman, who was mentored by by Dr. Geoffrey Ganter at the University of New England, presents his research findings at the Student Summer Symposium earlier this month.
The annual Student Summer Symposium was hosted at MDI Biological Laboratory on Friday, August 4th and featured the research findings of undergraduate student fellows from colleges and universities across Maine through short talks and poster presentations.
The 17 undergraduate students highlighted below were awarded 10-week mentored research fellowships at various academic and research institutions in Maine through INBRE. In addition to mentored lab research, the students participated in bioinformatics workshops, ...
Former INBRE fellow and College of the Atlantic grad Nishad Jayasundara has been named the Juli Plant Grainger Assistant Professor of Global Environmental Health at Duke University, where his research focuses on exploring the adverse ecological and human health impacts of chemical pollution and climate change.
Nishad Jayasundara in 2006 as a then recent graduate of the College of the Atlantic.
Known for his innovative studies using fish species as sentinels to measure the biochemical and physiological consequences of exposure to chemical and physical stressors, Dr. Jayasundara recently has been working with an interdisciplinary team of environmental and health researchers to unravel how ...
Freeport resident Samuel Broadbent’s first exposure to the advanced gene-editing technology called “CRISPR” came during an INBRE short course for College of the Atlantic undergraduates. That fired an ongoing interest in the science of developmental biology.
“I find development to be particularly fascinating, how we go from a single cell to an entire organism,” he says. Today Broadbent continues to pursue his passion at the MDI Biological Lab, where most recently he has been training to use a truly state-of-the-art 3D “light sheet” microscope that the Lab just constructed – one of only 20 like it in the world. “The Lab ...
The Maine INBRE Core Access voucher program offers grants (up to $5000) to researchers affiliated with institutions involved in biomedical research and research training in Maine. These awards support research conducted at any Core facility in a northeast IDeA state (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Delaware) or other IDeA states if local services are unavailable. Funding is provided on a rolling basis and is determined by the scientific merit, availability of core services, and relevance of the proposal to biomedical research. For detailed information, please refer to the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) and the Maine INBRE website application ...
To meet the needs of a greater emphasis on Data Science in biotech research, the MDI Biological Lab is offering an NIGMS-supported an updated bioinformatics training course for undergraduate faculty in June 2023. Dr. Kelley Thomas, the Bioinformatics Core Director of the New Hampshire INBRE, is the course director.
The goal of the course is to support training in bioinformatics skills for college and university undergraduate science instructors so that they can effectively integrate bioinformatics into their science curricula, and help their students prepare for the 21st-century workplace. The course focuses on BASH training to enable classes to work in the ...