My Research is divided between two areas, bioinformatics and
biomarker discovery. My bioinformatics work includes development of
bioinformatics educational tools as well as working on the Reactome project as a
curator/editor. Reactome is a pathway database of cellular level
processes from "simple" events, such as biochemical reactions, to
"complex" events, such as the cell cycle. This project is a
multinational effort to integrate the overwhelming proliferation of
genomic data, into a human, biological process driven
database.
Biomarker discovery has grown out of my labs work on developing
affordable proteomics techniques used to identify protein
interactions effected by xenobiotic compounds of interest. This
biomarker discovery work is focused on two areas, chronic low-level
lead toxicity and manganese toxicity.
Low level, chronic toxicities are very difficult to identify and a
systematic method of identifying individuals who are exposed and
need further clinical attention needs to be established, further
increased lead exposure tends to occur in areas lacking economic or
social advantages. Humans are exquisitely sensitive to the presence
of lead. We are identifying and quantifying exposed individuals
altered gene and protein expression patterns, developing sets of
biomarkers for low level exposure.
Other projects are identifying gene expression signatures for
manganese toxicity in an effort to categorize the biological
pathways shared between manganese toxicity and Parkinson’s
disease.
We have also leveraged our work with the neuronal SNARE proteins
involved in neurotransmitter release to characterize SNARE mediated
mast cell exocytosis and develop SNARE specific inhibitor siRNA and
peptide therapies.