U of A Graduate Students Attend Argonne National Laboratory Resource Training Workshop

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U of A students at the BV-BRC workshop, from left: Abass Oduola, Adithya Polasa, Joseph Williamson, Stephanie Suave, Abigeal Omolewu, Hanan Alkabkabi, Arjun Chapagain and Aishat Lawal.

Six graduate students in the cell and molecular biology program and two in the poultry science program attended the Bacteria and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center workshop on Dec. 14 -16, 2022, at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois.

The workshop is a system designed to support work on bacterial and viral infectious diseases by integrating pathogen information and analysis tools. The system hosts data on protein structure and function, clinical studies, drug targets and resistance, and epidemiology, providing open-source tools for data analysis and genomic annotation.

The workshop focused on training researchers how to analyze and explore genomic data using these different resources. Analyses included comparative genomics, metagenomics and transcriptomics, from both webserver and command line interfaces. The analyses can be aimed at understanding evolution and disease processes for bacterial and viral pathogens at the molecular level, to elucidate the genes driving diseases in human and agricultural systems.

Attendees included:

• Aishat Lawal, a master's student in cell and molecular biology, adviser Douglas Rhoads;
• Arjun Chapagain, a Ph.D. student in poultry science; Hanan Alkabkabi, a Ph.D. student in cell and molecular biology; and Abigeal Omolewu, a Ph.D. student in poultry science, all with adviser Young Min Kwon;
• Stephanie Suave, a Ph.D. student in cell and molecular biology; Joseph Williamson, a Ph.D. student in cell and molecular biology; and Adithya Polasa, a Ph.D. student in cell and molecular biology, all with adviser Mahmoud Moradi; and
• Abass Oduola, a Ph.D. student in cell and molecular biology, adviser Griffiths Atungulu.

"The Bacteria and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center has become an integral tool for many working at the DNA and protein level in viral and bacterial systems," said Douglas Rhoads, director of the cell and molecular biology program. "The complexities of the analyses can be quite daunting, but the center has been bringing them to scientists through an integrated and user-friendly interface.

"This resource has been supported by the federal government through the National Institutes of Health for many years and has been growing in stature as an integral tool for genomics and bioinformatics," he said. "This workshop afforded our students an opportunity to learn how best to use the system from the people who are developing it. This was a competitive program, and I am extremely happy and proud of how many were accepted and were able to go to a national laboratory for this important workshop. This demonstrates the high caliber and quality of the graduate students training at the University of Arkansas."