Thirty UCR scientists from life science and engineering departments recently met at the Arrowhead Conference Center for a 3 day retreat sponsored by the NSF Video Bioinformatics IGERT grant. The retreat featured presentations by all of the participants and discussions of the IGERT program and how it will evolve. Video bioinformatics is a new field of research that develops tools for mining information from video data. Dr. Bir Bhanu is the principal investigator on the NSF grant that supports this program. Stem cell biologists and engineers working on stem cell problems who spoke at the retreat included Dr. Andy Obenaus, Dr. Prue Talbot, Ivann Martinez and Anthony Bianchi, Shawn Fonteno, Benjamin Guan, Dr. Amit Chowdhury, and Katya Mkrtchyan.

Video bioinformatics is being used by our UCR stem cell biologists who have access to one of the few BioStation CT instruments in the country. The BioStation is a specially designed incubator that allows high content time lapse imaging of living mammalian cells in phase or fluorescent channels thus allowing UCR to perform and analyze unique experiments in stem cell biology. Biologists working with stem cells from plants were also participants and presented information on video bioinformatics tools developed for tracking cells in meristems and measuring cell volume. Stem cell biology is a focus of the UCR NSF IGERT program in Video Bioinformatics.