THE Cornell University, parent institution of the WCMC-Q, is a key partner in the unique Bridging the Rift (BTR) Centre coming up on a 150-acre desert site donated by Jordan and Israel in the Araba valley south of the Dead Sea.
“The centre aims to set up a biological sciences databank prototype, ‘Library of the Desert’ featuring information about all species found in the Dead Sea region,” Cornell president Jeffrey Sean Lehman has said.
The life sciences research complex, led by the BTR Foundation, has as its other partners the governments of Jordan and Israel and Stanford University.
The centrepiece of the BTR Centre is the ‘Library of Life’ project, which would have scientists, aided by post-doctoral researchers and graduate students, collecting information on living systems, from microbes to plants to animals.
“The researchers would analyse ecological and environmental information at molecular and DNA levels and send it to the databank, which is currently under development at Cornell,” said Lehman.
The Library of the Desert prototype is expected to have a profound impact on the intersection of information and computer sciences with the life sciences, providing a catalogue of organisms, their interactions with each other and their environment, their physiology and their genes.
The first resident scientists drawn from Jordanian and Israeli universities as well as from Cornell and Stanford are scheduled to arrive at the centre next year, according to an online edition of Cornell Chronicle.
“It is hoped that the new databank at the heart of the library would become a Google of the biological sciences and an essential online research tool for every investigator in modern life sciences,” the publication stated. |
