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Information system to help scientists analyze mechanisms of social behavior
Jim
Barlow, Life Sciences Editor
217-333-5802; jebarlow@illinois.edu
9/16/2004
|
CHAMPAIGN,
Ill. — With
a $5 million, five-year grant from the National
Science Foundation, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
will create BeeSpace,
a system to help scientists analyze all sources of information relevant
to the mechanisms of social behavior.
The complex society of the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, will drive
the information system. The system will be a software environment that
“will help to shed light on an unprecedented scale on the relationship
between genes and how lives are carried out in an animal society,”
said principal investigator Bruce Schatz, professor of library
and information science.
“We will take a fresh look at the fundamental problem of the mechanism
of behavior, whether behavior is caused by nature or nurture,”
said Schatz, who also directs the Community Architectures for Network
Information Systems (CANIS) Laboratory, a campus resource for new information
systems.
“Worries abound over the ethical implications of genetic determinism,”
he said. “The goal of BeeSpace is to help forge a deeper understanding
of the relationship between genes and behavior that transcends nature-nurture.
This project will use genomic biology to demonstrate that what matters
for social behavior is that DNA is both genetically inherited and environmentally
responsive.”
BeeSpace was one of six awards totaling $30 million announced today
as part of the NSF’s Frontiers
of Integrative Biological Research (FIBR), a program now in its
second year. BeeSpace will be housed in the Institute
for Genomic Biology (IGB), now under construction on Gregory Drive
in Urbana. The $75 million state-of-the-art facility, which will open
in mid-2006, will be home to 400 campus researchers in three broad areas:
systems biology, cellular and metabolic engineering, and genome technology.
“We are pleased to provide the institutional support for BeeSpace,
which will be a flagship project for the institute,” said Harris
Lewin, IGB director and professor of animal sciences. “We are
putting significant resources behind this project to ensure that it
demonstrates the great potential of genomic biology.”
New genome technology will underlie the BeeSpace efforts in biology
and informatics research.
“In biology research, we will develop the first complete analysis
of the normal behavior of an animal at the level of gene expression,“
said Gene E. Robinson, professor of entomology.
Robinson, the G.W. Arends Professor of Integrative Biology and director
of the Neuroscience Program at Illinois, is one of six scientists with leading roles in BeeSpace.
Robinson also is coordinating the honey-bee genome project, which began
in 2002, with sequencers at the Human Genome Sequencing Center at the
Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
“Honey bees are complex social animals with highly flexible behavior,”
he said. “They live in the equivalent of an urban environment
where much of their social behavior is in response to environmental
conditions.” A BeeSpace team led by Robinson will generate a molecular
signature of all the major roles performed by honey bees. “To
do this,” he said, “we will generate profiles of gene expression
that occurs in the brain of individuals that are captured in the very
act of performing their normal activities.”
While the experimental model is an insect, the researchers will use
broad categories of social roles that could potentially apply to higher
organisms, including humans. To further support comparisons across organisms,
genes whose expressions are particularly significant for social behavior
will be localized within the bee brain.
Susan Fahrbach, a long-time professor of entomology at Illinois who
now is the Reynolds Professor of Developmental Neuroscience at Wake
Forest University in North Carolina, will handle the neuroanatomy. She
also will use BeeSpace in undergraduate education.
“In informatics research, we will develop the first complete environment
to conceptually navigate all the knowledge about a major model organism,“
Schatz said.
“The BeeSpace environment will include all information relevant
to social behavior of honey bees, from genome databases and scientific
literature,” he said. “This information will be indexed
with new semantic technologies that will support interactive navigation
across many sources from many viewpoints, at the level of concepts rather
than data.”
Technologies to statistically analyze the information sources to enable
semantic indexing will be developed by ChengXiang Zhai, professor of
computer science and an expert on processing natural language for information
retrieval. Sandra Rodriguez-Zas, professor of animal sciences and expert
on designing microarray experiments, will pursue technologies to analyze
the gene expressions.
The experimental users of BeeSpace will be an international community
of biologists who study honey bees and related organisms. The education
and outreach will be supervised by Bertram Bruce, professor of library
and information science. Students and educators will be fundamentally
involved in the project.
University students will be trained in the frontiers of integrative
biology, and advanced high school and minority middle-school students
will get a taste of the scientific research.
“By testing the BeeSpace environment with users at different levels,
we hope to demonstrate the utility of concept navigation across community
knowledge,“ Schatz said. “Similar information technology
can then serve as a model of the Interspace, the generation of the Net
beyond the Internet, where all the world’s knowledge can be easily
analyzed across many sources.”
