I am looking to hire the first member of the Baxter lab, the technician who will run the ionomics facility. Here is the ad:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Agricultural Research Service (ARS), Plant Genetics Research Unit in St. Louis, Missouri is seeking applications for a permanent, full-time PHYSICAL SCIENCE TECHNICIAN, GS-07 to provide support with the operation of a high-throughput elemental profiling facility centered around inductively coupled plasma spectrophotometers. Salary is commensurate with experience (38,117 - 49,553 per year), plus benefits. US Citizenship is required. Candidates must request a copy of the vacancy announcement (ARS-X9W-0265) by either calling 301-504-1583 or by copying the full text announcement from the http://www.ars.usda.gov/Careers/Careers.htm website. Candidates must submit specific information as outlined in the vacancy announcement. Applications must be received by the closing date of September 24, 2009. The USDA/ARS is an equal opportunity provider and employer.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Grant Submitted to NSF-ABI
In collaboration with Olga Vitek, David Salt and Mourad Ouzzani at Purdue University, we just submitted a grant to the NSF Advances in Bioinformatics Infrastructure program. The title of the grant was "Connecting ionome and deletome: a computational and statistical approach".
In this grant, we propose to use the Yeast ionomics datasets as a model to:
1. Develop statistical methods to deal with large screens of high-dimensional phenotyping data.
2. Develop workflows to integrate multiple data types to generate knowledge using these datasets and other publicly available datasets.
3. Incorporate tools into Piims to facilitate these types of projects.
In this grant, we propose to use the Yeast ionomics datasets as a model to:
1. Develop statistical methods to deal with large screens of high-dimensional phenotyping data.
2. Develop workflows to integrate multiple data types to generate knowledge using these datasets and other publicly available datasets.
3. Incorporate tools into Piims to facilitate these types of projects.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
New Review
Dr. Baxter just published a review on ionomics in Current Opinions in Plant Biology titled "Ionomics: Studying the Social Network of Mineral Nutrients". Contact Dr. Baxter for a PDF.
You can find a full list of Dr. Baxters papers here.
You can find a full list of Dr. Baxters papers here.
New paper on an ionomics mutant
Renovations begin soon
We are in the middle of reviewing the designs for the lab renovations of the space that will house our prep lab and the instrument room.
The prep lab will have two digestion hoods and a weighing robot that will allow us to get the individual kernel/bean weights for the thousands of corn and soybean samples that we will be running. When we analyze arabidopsis, we can calculate the weights for the samples better than we can actually measure them with a 5 place balance (you can read about the weight calculation and see a powerpoint presentation of how it works here). Due to the much higher starch, oil or protein content of agricultural seeds, the proportion of the seed containing most of the elements is a much small proportion of the total seed. This would throw off the weight calculation so we are going to actually weigh each seed individually. Hence the need for the robot.
The Instrument lab will have two Perkin Elmer inductively coupled plasma (ICP) spectrometers: An Optima 7300DV optical emission spectrometer (OES) and an Elan DRC-e.
The prep lab will have two digestion hoods and a weighing robot that will allow us to get the individual kernel/bean weights for the thousands of corn and soybean samples that we will be running. When we analyze arabidopsis, we can calculate the weights for the samples better than we can actually measure them with a 5 place balance (you can read about the weight calculation and see a powerpoint presentation of how it works here). Due to the much higher starch, oil or protein content of agricultural seeds, the proportion of the seed containing most of the elements is a much small proportion of the total seed. This would throw off the weight calculation so we are going to actually weigh each seed individually. Hence the need for the robot.
The Instrument lab will have two Perkin Elmer inductively coupled plasma (ICP) spectrometers: An Optima 7300DV optical emission spectrometer (OES) and an Elan DRC-e.
The Baxter Lab is live!
The Baxter lab is open for business. We are part of the USDA-ARS Plant Genetics Research Unit (HQ is Columbia, MO) but we are housed at the Donald Danforth Plant Sciences Center in St. Louis, MO. Here is our Danforth website.
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