If you think you can’t understand what the Structure/Function Annotation of Lipid Binding in Arabidopsis Thaliana means, you need to pay a visit to Assistant Professor Shaneen Singh, the project’s principal investigator at Brooklyn College. She will break it down for you.
     A graduate of India’s Mohindra College at the Punjabi University (PU), Singh hails from Patiala, a college town of 300,000 where the literacy rate is 77 percent. She obtained her Ph.D. from the PU’s Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology
     Now in her fifth year at Brooklyn College, Singh has been conducting this sponsored research with a $744,000 grant from the National Science Foundation since 2006. Although the grant releases her from having to teach full time, she has as many as ten graduate and undergraduate students working with her in the lab. Yet there are no test tubes, no pipettes, no stoppers to be found in the lab. No worries.
     “In today’s world, research can be done in traditional, direct wet bench work or in silico, in computers,” explains Singh, whose theoretical research is based on scientific models that help predict biological functions that will later have to be put to the test
     Arabidopsis is the name for mustard weed, a model organism biologists use to study dicotyledon plants, the same way the fruit fly (Drosophila Melanogaster) has been a successful model for genetics studies. Since the Arabidopsis genome was sequenced, there has been active interest in explaining the proteins whose function (domain) is to recognize lipid binders that let them attach themselves to the membrane of the plant’s cell and operate a specific function
     “I had to build a new set of skills in computational analysis when I came to the United States in ’98,” Singh recalls. Her first postdoctoral work at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey paved the way to her second post-doc at the Cornell Medical College, where she met her former mentor, now colleague, Diana Murray, the principal investigator of the Columbia University Arabidopsis team
     “Our goal at BC is to develop a specific computational model of sub-cellular targeting,” Singh explains, echoing the subtitle of her project. “The significance of this grant is that lipid-binding domains in plants are greatly understudied. We need to compare what these domainshave in common with their counterparts in mammals and other organisms.
     The labs’ computers have to be fed with data and the tri-dimensional structures of proteins. Got it?  If not, you may want to take a biology class. You may even train with Singh
     “I teach computational biology here and at the CUNY Graduate Center,” she notes. “I assign each student a sequence to work on so he or she can get a feel about this kind of work. One of our students who is ready to defend has published two articles from the work she did with our team,” she says proudly
     The NSF grant goes up to 2010. So you still have time.