SITE SEARCH

Associate Professor, Pathology and Immunology Associate Professor, Genetics 4320 Forest Park Blvd., Cortex Building, 2nd Floor, Room 211 Office: (314) 362-8853 Lab: (314) 362-8853 E-mail: rakesh@wustl.edu Pub Med Search

Research

The goal of biomedical research is to uncover perturbations in important pathways that lead to disease states so that therapeutic treatments may be designed. It is clear that most diseases are caused by a set of alterations at one or more levels of the genetic program. Only through simultaneous monitoring of DNA, RNA, and protein can the comprehensive understanding of underlying processes occurring in multi-factorial diseases may be made. While there is a great need to integrate data derived from functional genomic experiments (e.g. expression, mutation, CGH, and proteomics profiling) with that ascertained clinically from the evaluation and treatment of patients, there are no software, analytical, or visualization applications which can perform this task. Thus, the primary, long term goals of the Nagarajan lab are to conduct clinical and biomedical informatics research, to develop software applications which will simultaneously co-analyze and co-visualize a wide variety of functional genomics datasets, gene annotation, and clinicopathological data, and to utilize these heuristic algorithms in order to identify potential diagnostic markers and putative therapeutic targets. These software based multiparametric medical diagnostic tests will be used for molecular "fingerprinting" of tumors and polyfactorial diseases and will ultimately lead to rational drug design to combat such illnesses.

Service to the University
	Present	Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center Bioinformatics Core Manager- Direct supervision of several on-site and off-shore programmers in their day-to-day activities, which include technical support and software

DBBS Graduate Program Affiliation
	Computational Biology Program
	Quantitative Human and Statistical Genetics Program

Clinical Interest
	Laboratory and Genomic Medicine - Informatics & Statistics

Selected Publications
	Chang, L. W., Nagarajan, R., Magee, J. A., Milbrandt, J., and Stormo, G. D.. A systematic model to predict transcriptional regulatory mechanisms based on overrepresentation of transcription factor binding profiles. Genome Res, 16(3):405-13, 2006 Abstract
	Le, N., Nagarajan, R., Wang, J.Y., Svaren, J., LaPash, C., Araki, T., Schmidt, R.E., Milbrandt. , J., Nab proteins are essential for peripheral nervous system myelination. Nat NeuroSci, 8, 932-940, 2005 Abstract
	Le, N., Nagarajan, R., Wang, J.Y., Araki, T., Schmidt, R.E., Milbrandt, J.. Analysis of congenital hypomyelinating Egr2Lo/Lo nerves identifies Sox2 as an inhibitor of Schwann cell differentiation and myelination. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 102, 2596-601, 2005 Abstract
	Walter, M. J., Park, J. S., Lau, S. K., Li, X., Lane, A. A., Nagarajan, R., Shannon, W. D., and Ley,. Expression profiling of murine acute promyelocytic leukemia cells reveals multiple model-dependent progression signatures.. Mol Cell Biol 24, 10882-10893, 2004 Abstract
	Nagarajan R., Ahmed, M., and Phatak, A.. Database Challenges in the Integration of Biomedical Data Sets. In Proceedings of VLDB Conference, Toronto, Canada, 2004
	Young A, Nagarajan R, Longmore G.. Mechanisms of transcriptional regulation by Rb-E2F segregate by biological pathway. Oncogene 22:7209-7217, 2003 Abstract
	Modur V, Nagarajan R, Evers BM, Milbrandt J. FOXO proteins regulate TRAIL expression: Implications for PTEN mutation in prostate cancer. J Biol Chem 277:47928-47937, 2002 Abstract
	Gutmann DH, Hedrick NM, Li J, Nagarajan R, Perry A, Watson MA. Comparative gene expression profile analysis of neurofibromatosis 1- associated and sporadic pilocytic astrocytomas. Cancer Res 62:2085-2091, 2002 Abstract
	Nagarajan R, Le N, Mahoney H, Araki T, Milbrandt J. Deciphering peripheral nerve myelination by using Schwann cell expression profiling.. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 99:8998-9003, 2002 Abstract
	Araki T, Nagarajan R, Milbrandt J. Identification of genes induced in peripheral nerve after injury. J Biol Chem 276:34131-34141, 2001 Abstract
	Nagarajan R, Svaren J, Le N, Araki T, Watson M, Milbrandt J. EGR2 mutations in inherited neuropathies dominant-negatively inhibit myelin gene expression. Neuron 30:355-368, 2001 Abstract
	Tourtellotte WG, Nagarajan R, Bartke A, Milbrandt J. Functional compensation by Egr4 in Egr1-dependent luteinizing hormone regulation and Leydig cell steroidogenesis. Mol Cell Biol 20:5261-5268, 2000 Abstract
	Tourtellotte WG, Nagarajan R, Auyeung A, Mueller C, Milbrandt J. Infertility associated with incomplete spermatogenic arrest and oligozoospermia in Egr4-deficient mice. Development 126:5061-5071, 1999 Abstract

Past Trainees Li-Wei Chang