Our Focused Infectious Disease Pathogens


Clostridium difficile is a species of Gram-positive bacteria of the genus Clostridium that causes severe diarrhea and other intestinal disease when competing bacteria in the gut flora have been wiped out by antibiotics.


Helicobacter pylori is a Gram-negative, microaerophilic bacterium that can inhabit various areas of the stomach, particularly the antrum. It causes a chronic low-level inflammation of the stomach lining and is strongly linked to the development of duodenal and gastric ulcers and stomach cancer. Over 80 percent of individuals infected with the bacterium are asymptomatic. More than 50% of the world's population harbor H. pylori in their upper gastrointestinal tract. Infection is more prevalent in developing countries, and incidence is decreasing in Western countries. H. pylori's helix shape (from which the generic name is derived) is thought to have evolved to penetrate the mucoid lining of the stomach.

             

Enteroaggregative Escherichia coli (EAEC) are an increasingly important cause of diarrhea. E. coli belonging to this category cause watery diarrhea, which is often persistent and can be inflammatory. EAEC have been implicated in sporadic diarrhea in children and adults, in both developing and developed countries, and have been identified as the cause of several outbreaks worldwide. EAEC are defined by their ability to adhere to epithelial cells in a characteristic "stacked-brick" pattern but are otherwise highly heterogeneous. Genes that could contribute to the pathogenicity of EAEC encode adhesins, toxins, and other factors, all of which are only partially conserved.


Systems and Network Biology

Systems Biology is enabling researchers with an integrated approach to biology research to merge insights from many individual efforts to more completely understanding of how biological components work together as a system. Systems biologists use computational algorithm and modeling to collectively investigate and integrate all the dynamic components and interactions underlying the behavior of a living system from a single cell, to multicellular organism and to the complex community.

 


Cyberinfrastructure

The term "CYBERINFRASTRUTCURE" first used by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Blue-Ribbon Committee in 2003 in response to question on how NSF can remove existing barriers to rapid evolution of high performance computing via supercomputers and make it truly usable by all nation's scientists and citizens. Cyberinfrastructure refers to the new research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other high throughput computing and information processing services over the internet. In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.

                 

Gene Function Validation on Infectious Disease Related and Immune Response Genes

Gene targeting has shown to be an important part of a researcher's toolkit for genome manipulation. Traditionally, it involves insertion of exogenous DNA via homologous recombination. ZFNs technology is named as the "Method of the Year in 2010" by Nature Methods.