Student abstracts chosen for oral presentations:

• Annie Chiang, Genetics, University of Iowa, Phylogenetic profile of human disease genes
• Garrett Dancik, BCB, Iowa State, Computer simulations of Leishmania infection: a tool for understanding host susceptibility to L. amazonensis
• Marijn de Jong, Molecular Biology, New Mexico State University, Plant-fungal symbiosis and heavy metal tolerance: microarray based analysis of fungal transcription after cadmium exposure
• Matthew Moscou, BCB, Iowa State, Markermaker: an iterataive algorithm for optimization of fit between expression level polymorphisms and genetic marker datasets
• Ahmed Moustafa, Genetics, University of Iowa, Computational approach to predict Interferon Regulatory Factor 6 (IRF6) targets
• Sally Pias, Biochemistry, New Mexico State University, Modeling the structural consequences of zinc-site mutations in the cell cycle regulatory protein Mob1A
• Yves Sucaet, BCB, Iowa State, A stochastic simulation program for metabolic pathways

First place winners in the poster competition, which included $50 prizes:

• Kishore Nannapaneni, Biomedical Engineering, University of Iowa, Computational identification of operon-like candidates in Drosophila melanogaster and
• Deepti Reddy, Bioinformatics Summer Institute, Iowa State, Predicting protein-protein binding sites using conservatism-of-conservatism

Second place winners in the poster competition, which included $25 prizes:

• Marijn de Jong, Molecular Biology, New Mexico State University, Plant-fungal symbiosis and heavy metal tolerance: microarray based analysis of fungal transcription after cadmium exposure and
• Ananth Kalyanaram, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State, Scaffolding genomic contigs using LTR retrotransposons