Dr. Rachel Karchin receives National Science Foundation ABI grant

Rachel Karchin, Assistant Professor, JHU Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Institute for Computational Medicine, recently received an award of $695,000, over a three year period, from the National Science Foundation (“NSF”). This grant, entitled “ABI Innovation: Predicting the combined impact of multiple mutations on protein functional adaptation,” is part of the Foundation’s Advances in Biological Informatics (“ABI”) program.

The award, according to the NSF Website, is provided “to develop a new method to model higher order mutation interactions, by combining evolutionary genetics, network models, and protein sequence analysis.” NSF also reports that “This work promotes close interaction between the computational sciences and biology communities: It combines expertise in computational/statistical modeling of mutations in proteins and applied evolutionary genetics in microbial systems. The broader use of this work will be to anticipate the emergence of drug resistance in clinically relevant proteins.”

Dr. Karchin is collaborating on this study with Dr. Manel Camps, Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Toxicology, University of California, Santa Cruz.