Toxicology Track

Weekly Newsletter of the MSU Center for Integrative Toxicology
Director: Dr. Norbert Kaminski / Editor: Lauren St.John

July 27, 2009, Vol. 32, Number 29

Seminars / Courses

Seminars

Monday, August 3
The Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology presents Colin North, to give a dissertation defense seminar on  “In vivo and In vitro Mechanisms for Disruption of the Toll-like Receptor Activated Primary Immunoglobulin M Response by 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD)” on Monday, August 3, 2009 at 1 p.m. in B448-449 Life Sciences Building.

Tuesday, August 4
The Department of Animal Science presents Timothy B. Fredricks, to give a dissertation defense seminar on “An environmental risk assessment of several passerine bird species exposed to elevated concentrations of polychlorinated dibenzofurans while breeding in the river floodplains downstream of Midland, Michigan, USA” on Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 2 p.m. in the Zoology Conference Room, 203C Natural Science Building.

Courses

Computational Systems Biology and Dose Response Modeling Short Course
PHM 980-1, Section 301, 1 credit (fulfills the EITS Topics in Toxicology requirement)

Date: October 7-9, 2009 (all day Oct. 7 and 8, half day on Oct. 9)

Location: Food Safety and Toxicology Building, room 164

Instructors: Qiang Zhang, Sudin Bhattacharya, and Melvin E. Andersen, Division of Computational Biology, The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences; and Rory Conolly US Environmental Protection Agency.

Course Description: In this short course, you will learn:

• Current computational modeling techniques for the quantitative investigation of how biological systems respond to perturbations at the cellular level.

• Common themes in signal transduction and gene regulatory networks that underlie systems-level cellular behaviors including homeostasis, adaptation, threshold response, binary cell fate decisions, and irreversible differentiation.

• How molecular circuits comprising genes and proteins give rise to different dose response behaviors.

• To use these techniques to develop computational models for understanding and predicting dose response behaviors of drugs and environmental agents.

The course comprises lectures and hand-on computer simulation exercises. Students will be required to bring a PC laptop computer each day to the course as there will be sample data sets for them to model.

Please visit http://www.thehamner.org/education-and-training/drm_workshop.html for a full description of a one-week version of this course. Contact Dr. Norbert Kaminski, kamins11@msu.edu, with questions.

Please contact Diane Hummel, hummeld@msu.edu, in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology for course registration/override.