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The Johns Hopkins Unviversity Center Scholars ProgramOnline application is not currently available, please contact the coordinator for an application. OverviewThe Center Scholars Program, developed by Center for Talented Youth (CTY) and The Johns Hopkins Center for Excellence in Genome Science's (CEGS) Dr. Andrew Feinberg, provides an opportunity for CTY-qualified, underrepresented minority students to study genomics and participate in a graduate level research experience. The program is fully funded. Please see the CTY Web site (www.cty.jhu.edu) for specific program dates.
Eligible students apply first to the CTY course work component, followed by the laboratory internship component. The entire program can stretch over two or more summers. EligibilityEligible candidates are American citizens/permanent residents who, by reason of their culture, class, race, ethnicity, background, would bring diversity to undergraduate or graduate study in the genomic sciences. The program especially encourages applications from African Americans, Hispanic/Latino Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and others whose backgrounds and experiences would bring diversity to the field upon graduation from high school and matriculation in an undergraduate institution. Stipend and HousingStudents participating in the Center Scholars Program are fully funded during their stay. CTY Component: Students attending CTY summer programs received tuition and fees, books and supplies, as well as travel to and from the campus. Laboratory Internship Component: The Center Scholars Program will provide students with summer housing, meals, and travel to and from the Johns Hopkins campus. Additionally, all participants enrolled in the internship component of the program will receive a $3,500 stipend. 2009 Host Lab Project DescriptionsDr. James Potash: The student will be assessing DNA methylation for two genes: FRBPs and GRM. Work will involve bisulfate pyrosequencing to measure percent methylation in varying tissues from mouse and from human. These are candidate genes for major depression susceptibility. Dr. Dani Smith:This project will involve evaluating the effects of norepinephrine on emotional learning in C57BL/6 mice. The emotional task we will use will be a contextual fear conditioning task. Contextual fear conditioning is a type of associative learning task in which an aversive event (typically a mild footshock) occurs in a specific context such that the subject learns to fear the context, and will elicit specific behavioral responses such as freezing when placed in the context at subsequent times (in the absence of the aversive event). Generally, the subject is initially placed in the context and allowed to acclimate, during thei\ time behavior is observed (freezing may be recorded). Subsequently, the animal is returned to the context and after some specified period of time the US (unconditioned stimulus: shock) is delivered. Following this conditioning the subject is placed back into the same context in the absence of the US, and freezing is recorded. We will be assessing the effects of norepinephrine on performance of this task. Dr. Constance Griffin: The student will study survival times for patients with B-cell chrinoic lymphocytic leukemia (B-CLL) vary from years to decades. Molecular markers can provide a guide to estimating a patients prognosis. Interphase molecular cytogenetics using a panel of FISH probes is a useful and reliable approach, but some patients with "good prognostic markers" do poorly. One explanation may be the presence of additional genomic alterations that are not assayed by the very targeted FISH assays. Another may be the presence of chromosomal translocations that are not evident without culture with specific mitogens. The student will be involved in an ongoing project comparing the results of interphase FISH and metaphase (karyotype) analysis of cells; the use of array-CGH (array comparative genomic hybridization) to determine gain or loss of regions throughout the entire genome will also be included. The student will be involved in culture and harvest of lymphocytes from CLL patience, microscope and karyotype analysis, FISH, and SNP arrays. Dr. Hongkai Ji: The student will be involved in analyzing high-throughput genomic data to investigate gene regulatory programs encoded in human and mouse genome. He/she will learn how to use the existing bioinformatics tools to analyze microarray and sequencing data, and the project may also involve developing new analysis methods. Dr. Tao Wang: The intern will be helping us with our NextGen Sequencing project. We are currently doing large scale sequencing of glutamate receptors and related proteins in ~400 autism patients. The intern will be assisting in the DNA library preparation, including PCR reactions, running agarose gels, digestion and ligation reactions, etc. If the student is interested in computational analysis, they may also be involved in some of the sequence alignment and data analysis. Dr. Andy Feinberg: Our laboratory is studying the epigenetic basis of disease, including cancer, autism, and psychiatric illness. Epigenetics involves changes in DNA and chromatin structure that are remembered by the cell when it divides, such as DNA methylation, genomic imprinting, and histone modification. Epigenetics is important because many of the differences between a germ cell and a somatic cell, or two different tissue types, or a cancer and a normal cell, involve epigenetic changes rather than mutation in the DNA sequence. Early work from our group involved the discovery of specific alterations in DNA methylation in cancer, as well as common epigenetic (methylation and imprinting) variants in the population that may be responsible for a significant population-attributable risk of cancer. This has led to a major cancer epigenetics translational study to introduce epigenetic testing for cancer risk into the general medical setting. We are also investigating the molecular basis of Beckwith Wiedemann syndrome (BWS), the paradigm of cancer-predisposing disorders caused by an epigenetic mechanism, uncovering the first antisense RNA associated with human disease. In addition, we found that BWS is linked to in vitro fertilization technology. Recently we have developed a mouse model of loss of imprinting in cancer, in which we have found that epigenetic alterations in stem cells increase the risk of malignancy, and suggest an epigenetic progenitor origin of human cancer. We are also pioneering genome-wide technolgy for epigenetics research. We have been awarded a Center of Excellence in Genome Sciences (CEGS) from the NIH, to develop novel tools for genome-wide epigenetic analysis, applicable to disease generally. Work in the CEGS is an interdisciplinary collaboration involving investigators in the Schools of Medicine and Public Health, as well as the Icelandic Heart Association. We are applying these tools to common diseases, including bipolar disorder and autism. We are developing tools to investigate methylation, allele-specific gene expression, and chromatin modification genome-wide, and we are developing new quantitative tools for epigenome analysis. 2 Students were assigned here:
Principal Investigators (PI)
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Last Updated: October 19, 2009 |
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