Nicholas Provart

Dr. Nicholas Provart is a Professor and the Chair of the Department of Cell and Systems Biology. He completed his Bachelor's and Master's degree in the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. at Freie Universität Berlin.

Dr. Provart's interests lie in the use of bioinformatics tools (some of which his lab has developed and which are available at the Bio-Analytic Resource, http://bar.utoronto.ca; http://facebook.com/BioAnalyticResource) to identify novel aspects of plant biology, especially in the area of plant stress biology. For instance, cluster analysis of gene expression data from plants subjected to different abiotic and biotic stresses has provided putative functional roles for several plant transcription factors, cytochrome P450s, and other members within multigene families. Furthermore, gene expression analyses can also provide inferential mechanistic insights into the development of various organs or tissues, e.g. rice seed, at the metabolic or signal transduction level. Being a founding member of the Centre for the Analysis of Genome Evolution and Function, CAGEF - with its numerous high-throughput technology platforms, the Provart lab is well positioned to utilize and generate large amounts of sequence and gene expression data, following a systems biology approach. Students have a variety of projects ranging from purely "wet-lab" to those having both a mix of molecular and computational approaches to purely "dry-lab". He has supervised more than 100 undergrad project students, and 32 PDFs, RAs, PhD, and MSc students, most of who have published papers based on their work in the lab.

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