Patricia Canaan

Dr. Patricia Canaan received her B.S. degree in Medical Technology in 1986 at Oklahoma State University. She obtained her M.S. degree in 1990 in Microbiology and her Ph.D. degree in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics in 1997 at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater OK. Dr. Canaan then joined the department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Oklahoma State University in the research lab led by Dr. Rolf Prade investigated the genetics of plant cell wall breakdown by filamentous fungi including Aspergillus nidulans as a model system. In 2001, Dr. Canaan joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Oklahoma State University, where she served as Assistant Director of the OSU Microarray Core Facility. In 2004, Dr. Canaan joined the faculty at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Oklahoma State University, where she plays an important role in undergraduate teaching and academic advising. Dr. Canaan has developed a research program focused on antibiotic resistance in Elizabethkingia.

Research Interests:

The Canaan lab uses advanced technologies and genomics approaches including metagenomic and proteomic approaches, genome sequence analysis, transcriptomics, DNA microarray analysis and various bioinformatics tools to study a variety of biological problems. Studies have include intracellular parasitic modulation of gene expression in human host cells by Anaplasma phagocytophilum (de la Fuente 2008 and Galindo 2008) or Coxiella burnetii (Mahapatra 2010), specific induction and relief from carbon catabolite repression as two systems involved in expression of genes for metabolism of complex polysaccharides; and gene expression patterns during carbon deprivation and pectin metabolism by the filamentous fungus Aspergillus nidulans (Ray 2011 and Saykhedkar 2011) or Phanerochaete chrysosporium (Ray 2011). Bioinformatics tools such as PipeOnLine and GenePix Auto-Processor have been developed to assist in automated processing of large-scale biological data. PipeOnline is a web-based integration of tools designed to process DNA sequence data and generate online pubic and private databases (Ayoubi 2001). GenePix Auto-Processor (GPAP) is a web-based interface for second level preprocessing and statistical analysis of primary expression data obtained from microarray image processing (Weng 2005). More recently, Dr. Canaan's lab is interested in metagenomic and proteomic approaches to identify candidate enzymes to identify novel genes and enzymes in bacteria useful for lignocellulose bioconversion (Dalvi 2011 and Prabhakaran 2011). Tools, algorithms and robust computational resources for rapid pre-processing and annotation of metagomic-scale sequence data are vital to these studies.