Ever since Jim Turpen, Ph.D., receivedthe first Idea Networks of BiomedicalResearch Excellence (INBRE) BiomedicalResearch Infrastructure (BRIN) grant in2001, the relationship between theINBRE/BRIN program and the Centers forBiomedical Research Excellence (COBRE)in the state has blossomed.

“The link between INBRE/BRIN andthe COBREs is really fruitful,” said Dr.Turpen, professor and vice chair of thedepartment of genetics, cell biology and

anatomy at the University of NebraskaMedical Center.

“The advantage of the collaboration isthat the INBRE/BRIN scholars have aplace to learn about biomedical researchand the centers help to cultivate their ownpool of potential future graduate students,”he said.

It’s a seamless process that meets thegoals of the Institutional DevelopmentAward program (IDeA), a federal programthrough the National Institutes of Health

(NIH) aimed at increasing the researchcapacity in states, such as Nebraska, thattraditionally have not received much NIHfunding. The goal of the program is to builda statewide biomedical research infrastruc-ture among undergraduate and graduateinstitutions.

The IDeA program funds bothINBRE/BRIN and the COBREs.

Not only do the two programs introduceundergraduate students to biomedical

Thoreson, students share research excitement

Volume I, Issue III June 2006

INBRE, COBRE relationship proves ‘fruitful’ for state, researchers

Continued on page 3

Wally Thoreson, Ph.D., knows there ismore to the world than the eye can see.

“Humans actually see only a limitedspectrum of life. We can't see things thatmove very fast or slow,” Dr. Thoresonsaid.

“The world as we see it is very much afunction of the process of the eye. It’s notan accurate reflection of what's there,” hesaid.

Why we see the world as we do, thenormal functions of the eye and what hap-pens when disease disrupts those func-tions are all part of his focus of study.

Chemicals, such as calcium, producedby the eye and their regulation are alsopart of his study. Dr. Thoreson, professorof ophthalmology and visual sciences anddirector of research, has a five-year, $1.5million grant, funded by the NationalInstitutes of Health, to study the synapticcommunications from photoreceptors andcalcium regulation.

For his work in eye research, specifi-cally his investigation into synaptic trans-mission from rods and cones, Dr.

Thoreson received the 2003 College ofMedicine Joseph P. Gilmore OutstandingInvestigator Award.

He likes to look at the world in newways and share his excitement aboutresearch with students.

Two INBRE students have worked withDr. Thoreson for the past two summers.

“The students keep me on my toes.They cause me to evaluate basic assump-tions that I haven't looked at for a while.And I acquaint students with science andthe scientific process, and try to get themexcited about science,” he said.

The program provides undergraduatestudents the opportunity to do graduatelevel research for 10 weeks during thesummer.

“I give them a specific project with ascientific question to answer. I want themto learn something," Dr. Thoreson said.

His first student collected some datathat's in an article scheduled to be pub-lished later this year. The student's namewill appear on the article.

“It’s unusual for an undergraduate to

get his name on a published paper,” hesaid.

Those challenging questions and Dr.Thoreson's enthusiasm work together tocreate excitement about research - anexcitement he hopes the students share.

Wally Thoreson, Ph.D., has a five-yearNIH grant to study the synaptic communi-cation from photoreceptors and calciumregulations.

One critical component of the INBREproject is our ability to answer the questionposed in the above headline. Put anotherway: Are we meeting our goals and objec-tives of enhancing theresearch capacity inthe State?

A major part ofthis project involvesregular evaluation ofour progress. Thisevaluation processhas two aspects. Oneaspect is a series ofobjective data thatdocument the contri-butions of our faculty and students to thescientific community in terms of presenta-tions and publications. The second type ofinformation is more sociological in natureand involves the impact the program ishaving on the faculty and students on ourcampuses. We have retained a profession-al evaluation consultant to assist us in col-lecting and interpreting the sociologicaldata. At this time, I would like to reporton the objective contributions that ourfaculty and students have made over thepast several years.

One venue where we have had animpact is the Annual Meeting of theNebraska Academy of Sciences. Our stu-dents and faculty are asked to presenttheir research at this meeting. Graph 1illustrates the impact of our participationat this meeting. During the first year ofthe project, approximately 12 percent of

the biomedical related presentations wereby INBRE faculty and students. At theApril 2006 meeting, INBRE faculty andstudents accounted for 60 percent of thebiomedical research reports.

Another measure of our productivity ispresentations at national and internationalconferences. Our faculty and students areencouraged to submit their work for these

conferences and to attend if their abstractsare accepted. This is moving from thestatewide to the national level. Graph 2shows the number of presentations ourScholars have made at national meetings.During the first and second years of theproject, our students made two nationalpresentations; in 2006, they made 14.

The “gold standard” in the scientificcommunity, however, is publication of ourresearch results in peer-reviewed journals.Publication is the venue used to commu-nicate our results to the broad scientificcommunity and represents the permanentrecord of a scientific contribution. Overthe course of this project, our faculty andstudents have doubled the number ofannual presentations published in thepeer-reviewed literature. This is shown inGraph 3.

Are we making progress? I think thedata show that the answer is clearly yes. Icommend the research productivity of thefaculty and students on our undergraduateand graduate campuses.

Michael Jacobsen is a scholar that uni-versities around the country would beproud to claim as their student.

One of the main reasons that WayneState College canmake that claim, isbecause of the oppor-tunities that it pro-vides to undergradu-ates to conduct bio-medical researchthrough the INBREprogram.

“The opportunityto do research reallyattracted me to WayneState,” Jacobsen said.“Once I got to Wayne State, I got involvedin the INBRE program. I really enjoy it.”

Jacobsen’s love of research began in

high school at Laurel-Concord, whereclasses taught by Ed Brogie often didhands-on research. In the INBRE program,Jacobsen has worked with DougChristensen, Ph.D., at Wayne State andwith Serguei Vinogradov, Ph.D., andJoseph Vetro, Ph.D., at the University ofNebraska Medical Center.

In his research, Jacobsen has focusedon the physiochemical and biochemicalaspects of drug delivery in hopes ofdesigning more effective drug deliverysystems. Jacobsen was one of five BRIN

Scholars selected to present his research atthe National IDEA Conference, which willbe held in Washington, D.C., this July.

“Biomedical research is definitely anarea that interests me,” Jacobsen said.“Someday, I hope to be a researcher in themedical field.”

At Wayne State, Jacobsen has beencompleting an average of 25 hours eachsemester while majoring in three sub-jects: chemistry, biology and computerscience. Earlier this year, he was nameda recipient of the prestigious Barry M.Goldwater Scholarship, which is valuedat about $7,500 for the 2006-2007school year.

Jacobsen also was recently selected tobe the Wayne State student trustee for theNebraska State College System Board ofTrustees.

MichaelJacobsen

Nebraska INBRE: Are We Making Progress?

James Turpen, Ph.D.

Graph 1

Graph 3

Graph 2

Jacobsen looks forward to biomedical research career“Biomedical research is definitely an area

that interests me. Someday, I hope to be aresearcher in the medical field.”

-- Michael Jacobsen, Wayne State College student and BRIN Scholar

The Nebraska INBRE is funded through agrant from National Center for ResearchResources, a division of the National Institutesof Health.

Director: Program coordinator:Jim Turpen, Ph.D. William Chaney, Ph.D.jturpen@unmc.edu wchaney@unmc.edu

Grant coordinator: Newsletter staff:Penni Davis Bill O’Neill, Lisa Spellmanpkdavis@unmc.edu UNMC Public Affairs402.559.3316 402. 559.4353

Participating Ph.D.-granting institutions:University of Nebraska Medical Center,Creighton University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Participating undergraduate institutions:the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, theUniversity of Nebraska at Omaha, theUniversity of Nebraska at Kearney, CreightonUniversity, Nebraska Wesleyan University,Chadron State College, Doane College,Midland Lutheran College, Wayne StateCollege, Little Priest Tribal College and WesternNebraska Community College.

www.unmc.edu/inbre

Researchers who want to know howmolecules interact with each other, ana-lyze interactions and see it as three-dimensional models can call SimonSherman, Ph.D., at the UNMCBioinformatics and Molecular ModelingFacility.

Dr. Sherman, professor at the EppleyCancer Institute, is director of theBioinformatics Core Facility. “INBREsupport for this core laboratory helps tomake its services available to all investi-gators throughout the state,” he said.

Bioinformatics tools have become vitalfor progress in disciplines such as struc-tural biology and structural and functionalgenetics. These tools allow researchers toorganize structural and functional data, toextract the relevant information, and topresent it to a broad circle of researchersusing dynamic, interactive Intranet andInternet tools.

The Bioinformatics Core Facility pro-vides INBRE participants with computa-tional and informational resources forintensive searching and processing ofstructural and functional information onbiologically important molecules.Services are focused on genetic sequenceanalysis, molecular modeling and dynam-ic simulations and scientific data manage-ment. The Bioinformatics Core includeslaboratories from three institutions:UNMC (Dr. Sherman), UNO (Hesham

Ali, Ph.D.) and Creighton University(Sandor Lovas, Ph.D.). Researchersstudying cancer, Alzheimer’s disease,HIV, viruses, diseases of the brain andinfectious diseases have found help fromDr. Sherman’s laboratory.

Researchers bring him a sequence ofamino acids to be analyzed and comparedto the protein molecules with known crys-tal structures. Based on a sequence simi-larity, a three-dimensional structuralmodel of the new protein molecule willbe created by a process called homologymodeling.

“All diseases start at the molecularlevel. We provide a service so you can seewhat’s going on at that level,” Dr.Sherman said.

Educating undergraduate, graduate and

postgraduate students in bioinformatics-related disciplines is another goal of thecore facility. Several BRIN scholarsobtained practical experience and partici-pated in research projects in the laborato-ry. Dr. Sherman said that it initiates inter-campus and interdisciplinary certificationand promotes graduate programs to betterprepare Nebraska's students for work inthe Post-Genomic Era.

The core also maintains the web con-tent management and information sharingsystem – an easy-to-use Web site mainte-nance and data sharing tool, allowingINBRE collaborators to exchange dataand make time-sensitive changes in theWeb site. Dr. Sherman operates the labwith his associates, Leo Kinarsky, Ph.D.,research assistant professor; Eric Haas,manager of the Genetic SequencingAnalysis Facility, and Oleg Shats, instruc-tor of pathology/microbiology, and man-ager of Database Development and DataManagement.

Established in 2001, theBioinformatics Core Facility is an inte-grated part of the Nebraska InformaticsCenter for Life Sciences (NICLS), whichalso is under the direction of Dr.Sherman. The Web site of theBioinformatics Core is brin.unmc.edu/bioinformatics. The Web site for theNebraska Informatics Center for the LifeSciences is http://nicls.unmc.edu.

research but they also provide the fundingfor the infrastructure needed to build quali-ty COBREs, where those students wouldgo for graduate and post-doctoral training.

“We work to support each other,” saidCharles Wood, Ph.D., director of theNebraska Center for Virology at theUniversity of Nebraska-Lincoln, one offour current COBREs in the state.

“One of our goals is the training ofundergraduate students, graduate studentsand post-docs so that they are prepared fora career in research on infectious diseases,”Dr. Wood said.

Graduate student Kay Crabtree is anexample of this, he said. Crabtree is a for-mer INBRE/BRIN scholar from theUniversity of Nebraska at Kearney whoended up coming to Dr. Wood’s lab inLincoln for her doctoral training.

“The BRIN has provided support forKay initially, who is now being supported

by the T32 Training grant of the Center forVirology,” Dr. Turpen said. “It’s kind oflike the seed money researchers often startwith to get their research off the groundand prove to the NIH that it is somethingworth funding with a larger grant.”

Dr. Wood said that many of the faculty inhis lab have INBRE/BRIN scholars workingwith them this summer. Dr. Wood has men-tored seven undergraduates in the programsince he first partnered with Dr. Turpen.

After Dr. Turpen received initial fundingto establish the BRIN program, he lookedaround the state to see who had the neces-sary resources available to help him. Heneeded to partner with UNL and Dr. Woodwas the only one at the time who had aCOBRE, lab space and faculty willing tomentor undergraduate students on that cam-pus.

“He really saw the importance andadvantages of the INBRE/BRIN program,”Dr. Turpen said. “We've had great interac-tions with him.”

INBRE, COBRE relationship proves ‘fruitful’Continued from front page

Bioinformatics Core strengthens research

Leo Kinarsky, Ph.D., left, research assistantprofessor, and Simon Sherman, Ph.D., direc-tor of the Nebraska Informatics Center forLife Sciences.

Don't be alarmed if you walk into thelab of Kim Carlson, Ph.D., at theUniversity of Nebraska at Kearney(UNK) and see a 4-year-old peering into amicroscope.

That’s just Dr. Carlson’s son, Zane,who often accompanies mom to the labduring the summer.Zane likes looking atthe fruit flies hismom uses in herresearch and makingthem appear larger orsmaller under themicroscope.

“One day heexplained all theparts of the fly to meand told me that theyaren't happy living inthe bottles and want to be in the garden,”said Dr. Carlson.

It’s gratifying for the assistant profes-sor of biology at UNK to see her sonlearn and grow, she said. Her enthusiasmfor teaching is only outweighed by herresearch of drosophila melanogaster.

“Fruit flies can be used to study any-

thing that you would study in humans,”she said. “Human disease, aging, a lot ofwhat we know, all of those genes werefirst discovered and studied in fruit flies.

It's a great system and very easy for myundergraduate students to work with.”

And with the help of a $252,000 grantfrom the INBRE/BRIN program that Dr.Carlson and three fellow researchersreceived in 2004, they now have a placeof their own in which to conduct theirresearch. There’s no more waiting forclasses to end to get into a lab, she said.

“Our university now has both an ani-mal facility and a research lab,” she said.“It's fantastic! And it’s all because of theBRIN program. BRIN helped pay for theconstruction or furnishing of both, wewouldn't have it otherwise.”

Dr. Carlson is able to continue to con-duct her research on the human OTK18gene she worked on during her post-doc-toral training at the University ofNebraska Medical Center and agingresearch she worked on during her gradu-ate training at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. And she is able to do somethingelse she loves: teach undergraduate stu-dents about research.

“That's the reason I got my Ph.D.,because I wanted to teach undergraduatesand do research with them,” she said.

‘Fantastic’ INBRE funding assists UNK students, professorNebraska INBRE Administrative OfficeUniversity of Nebraska Medical Center986395 Nebraska Medical CenterOmaha, NE 68198-6395

NON-PROFITU.S.POSTAGE

PAIDOmaha,NebraskaPERMITNO.454

KimCarlson, Ph.D.

At a glance:Kim Carlson, Ph.D., assistant pro-

fessor in the department of biology atthe University of Nebraska at Kearney.

Areas of research: OTK18 geneand its potential benefits in humangene therapy to treat HIV and aging,both using fruit fly models and apply-ing the findings to humans.

Teaching responsibilities: geneticslecture and lab; human genetics;developmental biology; fundamentaltools for biological sciences; and con-cepts of genetics to online graduatestudents.

Dr. Carlson is married to molecularbiologist Darby Carlson, who is alsoher research assistant and a lecturer inthe biology department at UNK.Together, they have two children, ason, Zane, 4, and a daughter, Victoria,2 months.