Two high school juniors from Pulaski Academy, working with individuals affiliated with the MidSouth Bioinformatics Center (MBC) at UALR, placed first in the team project category in local, state and regional science fair competitions.

The project by Vijay Rajaram and Dave Grundfest – “Functional Gene Set Comparisons” – will compete at the 2008 International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) this month.

The project deals with “bioremediation” – using living things to clean up man-made pollution. The UALR team hoped to identify which microbes might be capable of “eating” oil spills without being susceptible to a common pitfall from previous efforts, quorum sensing. Starting with sets of known genes for each function (“eating oil” and “quorum sensing”), students used software that automatically compares the genes across all species using available databases from the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Working with UALR’s Roger Hall, technical director of MBC, the students are making their generalized software available to the public.

Kamakshi Duvvuru, a freshman from Little Rock Central High, placed first in the computer science category in the Regional Science fair and third in the State Science fair and is an alternate to the 2008 ISEF. Interested in identifying the genes associated with malignant tumors of the central nervous system, Kamakshi worked with bioinformatics UALR Ph.D. candidate Vinay Ravindrakumar to analyze the publicly available data, statistically finding the significant genes and then using data mining to identify the additional genes most closely associated.

In addition to placing in the top projects, Kamakshi also received several special awards, including the Intel Excellence in Computer Science award, Naval Science award, second place in the Arkansas Junior Academy of Science competition, and first place in the Arkansas Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience competition.

The joint bioinformatics center is a collaboration of UALR’s Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology (EIT) and UAMS. It is supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Research Resources.