a GENOMICS CENTER:
the ‘CORE of a RESEARCH INTENSIVE INSTITUTION’
Syracuse University biology professor Ramesh Raina (below, second from left) searches for answers to life’s big questions in small places.
One of them is the Arabidopsis (right), a tiny flowering plant of the mustard family that he uses to study plant-pest interactions. Through
molecular biological techniques, Raina hopes to make Arabidopsis and similar agricultural plants more resistant to insects, disease, and
extreme environmental conditions. “To fix a car, you have to understand how all the 
parts work and find which ones are causing the problem,”
he says. “The same is true for biological systems. If we can understand how plants respond to extreme cold, for instance, then we can develop
cold-tolerant plants and save farmers from losing crops to frost.”
Raina is one of numerous SU biologists who uses a Genomics
Center for extracting and sequencing of DNA. His current projects include a
National Science Foundation-funded study that aims to describe the function of every one of the approximately 28,000 genes of Arabidopsis.
“In the old days, people studied one gene at a time, but biology has become more sophisticated and the technology more complex, so now we
can study hundreds of genes simultaneously,” he says.
“This is important because biological processes are often controlled by multiple genes functioning in a coordinated fashion.”
Another of Raina’s projects, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, explores the perception and signaling of environmental stimuli in plants. Such studies may result in the development of plants capable of detecting chemical or biological weapons, or other dangerous substances in public places.
Biology professor Michael Cosgrove (top right), whose study of the structural biochemistry of proteins has direct applications for
curing human diseases, including cancers, puts the difficulty of conducting genomic studies into perspective. “If you take the DNA out
of one of our cells and stretch it end to end, it would be two meters [about six and a half feet] long,” he says. “Somehow, this gets
packaged into the size of a nucleus, which is only a couple of micrometers. That’s the same as stuffing 10,000 miles of spaghetti into
something the size of a basketball—without anything getting tangled.”
According to Cosgrove, a Genomics Center is vital to researchers working on cell signaling and ecology/evolutionary biology because it helps them better understand the sub-atomic world. “Looking for an expression of a particular gene is like looking for a needle in a haystack. But with the proper equipment, you can find it every time.”
A Genomics Center is expected to play a major role in the SU’s Life Sciences Complex, opening in Fall 2008.
“The Genomics Center will provide state-of-the-art molecular biological support for both research and teaching,” explains biology chair John Russell (left). “It will benefit biologists studying the ‘micro’ world, and, in turn, their ‘macro’ world colleagues, who apply the fruits of genomic research directly to the solving of practical problems.”