The University of NottinghamDaniel Zadik
e.mail: dz45 at le.ac.uk
Adrian Building,
University Road,
Leicester, LE1 7RH,
United Kingdom
I now have a post-doctoral position with Mark Jobling in the Genetic Department of the University of Leicester, working on the "Sex, Genomes and History" project.
Research Interests:
In October 2005 I started a PhD, supervised by Charlie Hodgman (MyCIB: the Multi-Disciplinary Centre for Integrative Biology) and Paul Jones (Mars-SymBioScience). I am very grateful to be funded by the BBSRC and Masterfoods.
My PhD involves a systems biology approach to study dog metabolism and the factors and mechanisms that control it, with the aim of a deeper understanding of the relationships between breed, diet and health.
Dog breeds are very inbred and each is prone to specific health conditions.
Many of these are caused by abnormalities in metabolism, influenced by a variety of genetic and dietary factors.
A holistic network model of dog metabolism was inferred from several human ones,
and integrated with gene-expression, signal-transduction and protein-protein interaction networks.
The model highlights possible gaps in knowledge, directs future laboratory research and provides a structure for the mapping of transcriptomic data and annotation.
These can be used to select subgraphs with breed-specific behaviour.
By better understanding dog metabolism, changes in diet of specific breeds may be used to minimise risks of some of these health conditions in specific breeds.
A side project has involved the comparison of transcriptomic data from dogs, rats and humans exposed to a specific agrochemical, which was also mapped onto metabolic networks.
From this I was able to propose hypothetical mechanisms of toxicity. I have also constructed a database of dog disease, gene and breed associations,
in collaboration with a project student whom I was supervising.
Previous Work:
Before starting my PhD, I worked as a Bioinformatics Research Assistant for the Bennett Laboratory, collaborating with colleagues by carrying out any Bioinformatics based work they required as part of their projects.
I have used Affymetrix microarray data to build a tool that visualises differences in expression of selected genes between tissues or conditions. As part of EDEN, this has been used to reduce the problem of genetic redundancy between homologues of poplar vascular development genes in an Arabidopsis model. This work has identified two genes involved with secondary cell wall thickening, and produced a paper (see below).
I carried out sequence analysis and statistics to predict the domain topology and the differing importance of amino acid residues at various positions within the presumptive Arabidopsis thaliana auxin influx carrier AUX1 . This lead to a paper in the journal, Plant Cell. I also have been involved with the development of a SNP-based assay for the authentication of Basmati Rice.
Since 2002 i have maintained the Bennett Laboratory
and TArGet Websites and I have created an
Arabidopsis Affymetrix Data-Mining Tools Site. I
have been involved with teaching on the Graduate
School Course on Post-Genomics and Bioinformatics and the TArGet
Workshop: "Working with Arabidopsis Affymetrix Data",
the latter of which I organised, and gave a number of seminars on.
Before coming to the University of Nottingham, I completed a BSc in Applied Biology at the University of Bath (tutor: Stuart Reynolds); I then worked for Chris Boshoff at the CRC Viral Oncology Laboratory at UCL, looking into the molecular biology of Kaposi's-Sarcoma-associated HerpesVirus; and then I focused my interests with an MSc in Bioinformatics (run by David Parkinson) at Sheffield Hallam University.
Publications:
In Biological Data Mining in Protein Interaction Networks, Edited by Xiao-Li Li and See-Kiong Ng. 2008.
Graphical Analysis and visualisation tools for protein interaction networks.
*Gollapudi S, *Marshall A, *Zadik D, Hodgman C. (* JOINT FIRST AUTHOR)
Physiologia Plantarum. 2007. 129 (2): 415-428.
Genomic assisted identification of genes involved in secondary
growth in Arabidopsis utilizing transcript profiling of Poplar wood forming
tissues.
Ubeda-Tomas S, Edvardsson E, Eland
C, Kumar Singh S, Zadik
D, Aspeborg H, Gorzsas A, Teeri T, Sundberg B, Persson P, Bennett
M, Marchant A.
Plant Cell. 2004 Nov. 16 (11):3069-83.
Structure-Function Analysis of the Presumptive Arabidopsis Auxin
Permease AUX1.
Swarup
R, Kargul J, Marchant A, Zadik D,
Rahman A, Mills R, Yemm A, May
S, Williams L, Millner P, Tsurumi S, Moore I, Napier R, Kerr
ID, Bennett
MJ.