Robert J. Boissy, Ph.D.

Education

Research Interests

• The bioinformatics and computational biology of host immune responses, infectious agents, and cancer
• The design and implementation of very large relational databases and analysis services
• The integration of very large relational databases and analysis services, and exposure of their functionality, using web services
• Data analysis and visualization using software tools for statistics and discrete mathematics
• Structured Query Fragment Analysis (SQF analysis), and its use for the discovery of molecular diagnostics for early-stage cancer detection, cancer treatment efficacy monitoring, and the detection of otherwise undetectable infectious agents
• Robotics and computer-assisted laboratory automation. The development of solid-phase technologies for the manipulation and analysis of polynucleotides
• The chemistry of polynucleotides and their constituent monomers, and the analytical chemistry of polynucleotide detection and characterization

Current Projects

• Assembly and annotation of genomic DNA sequence data obtained from bacterial clinical isolates
• Assembly and annotation of data generated by next-generation DNA sequencing technologies
• Distributed computing infrastructure support for bioinformatics and computational biology

Professional Memberships

Member, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Member, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Member, IEEE Computer Society
Member, International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB)

Honors & Awards

Publications

Boissy RJ, Astell CR. 1985. An Escherichia coli recBCsbcBrecF host permits the deletion-resistant propagation of plasmid clones containing the 5í-terminal palindrome of minute virus of mice. Gene 35:179-185.

Kay RJ, Boissy RJ, Russnak RH, Candido EPM. 1986. Efficient transcription of a Caenorhabditis elegans heat shock gene pair in mouse fibroblasts is dependent on multiple promoter elements which can function bidirectionally. Mol Cell Biol 6:3134-3143.

Boissy RJ.  1994.  Some new approaches to conventional methods for the study of protein-DNA interactions.  Ph.D. Thesis, The University of British Columbia.  

Millikan RC, Pittman GS, Tse CK, Duell E, Newman B, Savitz D, Moorman PG, Boissy RJ, Bell DA. 1998. Catechol O-methyl transferase and breast cancer risk. Carcinogenesis 19:1943-1947.

Katoh T, Kaneko S, Boissy R, Watson M, Ikemura K, Bell DA. 1998. A pilot study testing the association between N-acetyltransferases 1 and 2 and risk of oral squamous cell carcinoma in Japanese people. Carcinogenesis 19:1803-1807.

Katoh T, Boissy R, Nagata N, Kitagawa K, Kuroda Y, Itoh H, Kawamoto T, Bell DA. 2000. Inherited polymorphism in the N-acetyltransferase 1 (NAT1) and 2 (NAT2) gene(s) and susceptibility to gastric and colorectal adenocarcinoma. Intl J Cancer 85:46-49.

Boissy R, Watson MA, Umbach SD, Deakin M, Elder J, Strange RC, Bell DA. 2000. A preliminary study investigating the role of NAT1 and NAT2 polymorphisms in gastric adenocarcinoma. Intl J Cancer 87:507-511.

Lasken RS, Raghunathan A, Kvist T, Ishoy T, Westermann P, Ahring BK, Bossiy R.  2005.  Multiple displacement amplification from single bacterial cells.  In:  Whole Genome Amplification.  Hughes, S, & Lasken, R.S., Eds., Scion Publishing Ltd., Blxham, UK.

Carreon T, Ruder AM, Schulte PA, Hayes RB, Rothman N, Waters M, Grant DJ, Boissy R, Bell DA, Kadlubar FF, Hemstreet GP, Yin S, LeMasters GK. 2006. NAT2 slow acetylation and bladder cancer in workers exposed to benzidine. Int J Cancer 118:161-168.

Hogg JS, Hu FZ, Janto B, Boissy R, Hayes J, Keefe R, Post JC, Ehrlich GD.  2007.  Characterization and modeling of the Haemophilus influenzae core and supra-genome supragenome based on the complete genomic sequences of Rd and 12 clinical nontypeable strains.  Genome Biology 8(6):R103.

Mußmann M, Hu FZ, Richter M, de Beer D, Preisler A, Jørgensen BB, Glöckner FO, Amann R, Koopman WJH, Janto B, Hogg JS, Boissy R, Lasken RS, Stoodley P, Ehrlich GD.  2007. Insights into the genome of large sulphur bacteria revealed by analysis of single filaments.   PLoS Biology 5(9):e230.

Hiller NL, Janto B, Hogg JS, Boissy R, Yu S, Powell E, Keefe R, Ehrlich NE, Shen K, Hayes J, Barbadora K, Klimke W, Dernovoy D, Tatusova T, Parkhill J, Bentley SD, Post JC, Ehrlich GD, Hu FZ. 2007.  Comparative genomic analyses of seventeen Streptococcus pneumoniae strains:  Insights into the pneumococcal supragenome 2.  J Bacteriol 189(22):8186-8195.

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