UC San Diego, Department of Bioengineering

Jennifer Fang learned her first programming language, Visual Basic, in the third grade. Since then she has honed her programming skills and is entering UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering this fall as a freshman computer science major, with an emphasis on bioinformatics.

“I chose to specialize in bioinformatics because I want to apply my computer science knowledge to the biomedical field,” said Fang, who came to UCSD from Thousand Oaks, Calif. “I chose UCSD because it is a nationally renowned research university and has highly ranked biological science and computer science programs.”

Investigators at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham), University of California, San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) and other institutions have constructed a complete model, including three dimensional protein structures, of the central metabolic network of the bacterium Thermotoga maritima (T. maritima). This is the first time scientists have developed such a comprehensive model of a metabolic network overlaid with an atomic resolution of network proteins. The analysis of the model, among others, highlights the important role of a small number of essential protein shapes, lending new insights into the evolution of protein networks and the functions within these networks. The study was published in the journal Science on September 18.