A UT Arlington computer science and engineering professor with an expertise in big data and bioinformatics has won a three-year National Science Foundation grant worth more than $600,000 to develop an interactive database of gene expressions of the fruit fly.

Heng Huang, an associate professor, will lead the project with professor Chris Ding, also of the UT Arlington Computer Science and Engineering department. Scientists are compiling and studying data related to the insects because a large number of genes involved in fruit fly development are commonly found in humans and other species.

Research efforts into the spatial and temporal characteristics of fruit fly gene expression images have been at the leading edge of scientific investigations into the fundamental principles of different species development, the UT Arlington team wrote.

"We're building a system through which the computer will recognize what happens in these fruit fly genes and how the genes then interact with each other," Huang said. "Because so many of the genes involved in fruit fly development are found in humans and other species, finding out what these expressions are and how they work with each other is highly important."

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