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Eve Syrkin Wurtele
Professor

Eve Wurtele

Dr. Wurtele, Professor, received her B.S. in Biology from the University of California-Santa Cruz, and her Ph.D. in Biology from the UCLA. After serving as a postdoctoral fellow at UC-Davis and Senior Research Scientist at NPI, Inc., Dr. Wurtele joined the faculty at Iowa State University in 1988 as an affiliate Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Professor in 1999. She is a member of the Interdepartmental Programs, and is a Plant Science Institute Core Faculty Member. In 1999, she organized the first Plant Science Institute international symposia series at ISU.

Research Description

Dr. Wurtele's research, juxtaposed at the interface between biology and computational sciences, centers on the interplay between the metabolic and regulatory signals: the metabolic network of plants. The Wurtele group is using an integrated experimental/biocomputational approach to understand the factors that regulate plant development and composition. This research is revealing a complex network that incorporates genes of previously unknown function that mediates the accumulation of proteins, starches and oils in plant leaves and seeds. Further, it has enhanced our understanding of the mechanisms of synthesis of unusual medicinal compounds. A practical consequence is that it provides new approaches to engineer plants, a biorenewable energy source, and microorganisms to accumulate large quantities of industrially-useful chemicals, and improve our food supply.

Dr. Wurtele and colleagues have developed the award-winning videogame, Meta!Blast. Meta!Blast takes the player into an metabolic adventure within a 3D photosynthetic cell.  Recent Meta!Blast awards include:

2012    Meta!Blast 3D interactive application for cell and metabolic biology. Level 1: the cell.  Honorable mention 2011 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. Featured in: Science 335:533.

2012     Featured at the 2012 American Association for Advancement of Science Annual Meeting

2012    International Science and Engineering Challenge Finalist, Illustration (The Cytosol). Science Magazine and National Science Foundation.

Contact Information

441 Bessey Hall
Ames, IA 50011
515-294-8989 voice
515-294-1337 fax

Web Sites

http://metablast.org
3D videogame to teach cell and metabolic biology. (Research sponsored by SEPA- National Institutes of Health; National Science Foundation; and Iowa State University)

http://metnetdb.org
bioinformatics tools for analysis and visualization of biological networks (Research sponsored by National Science Foundation)

Education

B.S., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1971
Ph.D., UCLA, 1980

Publications

Pub Med Link to all publications

  • Crispin MC, Wurtele ES. 2012. Use of Metabolomics and Transcriptomics to Gain Insights into the Regulation and Biosynthesis of Medicinal Compounds: Hypericum as a Model. Chapter 18 In: Biotechnology for Medicinal Plants: Propagation and improvement. S Chandra, H Lata, AVarma, ed., Springer. In Press.
  • Ngaki MN, Louie GV, RN, Manning G, Pojer F, Bowman ME, Li L, Elise Larsen E, Wurtele ES, Noel JP. 2012. Evolution of the chalcone isomerase fold from fatty acid-binding to stereospecific enzyme. Nature. 485:530-533. doi:10.1038/nature11009
  • Feng YP, Hurst J. Almeida-De-Macedo M. Chen X. Li L. Ransom N, Wurtele ES. 2012. A massive human co-expression-network and its medical applications. Special Issue: Molecular Networks and Disease. Systems Biology, Chemistry & Biodiversity. May;9(5):868-87. doi: 10.1002/cbdv.201100355
  • Schneller W, Campbell PJ, Bassham D, Wurtele ES 2012. Meta!Blast computer game: a pipeline from science to 3D art to education. The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality, Eds: McDowall IE, Dolinsky M. International Society for Optics and Photonics. SPIE 828905. http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.911289
  • Quanbeck SMM, Brachova L, Campbell AA, Guan X, Perera A, Seung KA, Rhee Y, Bais P, Dickerson J, Dixon P, Wohlgemuth G, Fiehn O, Barkan L,  Lange BM, Lee I, Cortes D, Shuman J, Shulaev V, Huhman D, Lei Z, Sumner LW, Roth MR,  Welti R, Ilarslan H, Wurtele ES,  Nikolau .BJ. 2012. Metabolomics as a hypothesis-generating functional genomics tool for the annotation of Arabidopsis thaliana genes of "unknown function"  Frontiers of. Plant Science. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2012.00015
  • Ding G, Che P, Ilarslan H, Wurtele ES, Nikolau BJ. 2012. Genetic dissection of methylcrotonyl-CoA carboxylase indicates a complex role for mitochondrial leucine catabolism during seed development and germination. Plant Journal. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-313X.2011.04893.x
  • Peng J, Ilarslan H, Wurtele ES, Bassham DC. 2011. AtRabD2b and AtRabD2c have overlapping functions in pollen development and pollen tube growth. BMC Plant Biology. 11:25
  • Stenerson M, Schneller W, Wurtele ES. 2012.  Enabling Educators to Customize the Game Environment. Procedings of Games, Learning and Society Conference, 2011. http://www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/content/gls-70-conference-proceedings
  • Li X, Ilarslan H, Brachova L, Qian HR, Li L, Che P, Wurtele ES, Nikolau BJ. 2011  Reverse genetic analysis of the two biotin-containing subunit genes of the heteromeric acetyl-CoA carboxylase in Arabidopsis thaliana indicates a unidirectional functional redundancy. Plant Physiol.    PubMed PMID: 21030508.
  • Sucaet Y, Wurtele ES. 2010. MetNetAPI: A flexible method to access and manipulate biological network data from MetNet. BMC Res Notes. 3:312.    PubMed PMID: 21083943; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2998519.
  • Wu L, Rowe EW, Jeftinija K, Jeftinija S, Rizshsky L, Nikolau BJ, McKay J, Kohut M, Wurtele ES. 2010. Echinacea-induced cytosolic Ca2+ elevation in HEK293. BMC Complement Altern Med.10:72.    PubMed PMID: 21092239; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3002894.
  • Jia M,Li L,Boggess E, Wurtele ES, Dickerson JA. 2010. "Visualizing Multivariate Hierarchic Data Using Enhanced Radial Space-Filling Layout," in Advances in Visual Computing. 6453: Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, pp. 350-360. Jia M, Chio SY,  Rieners D, Wurtele ES, Dickerson J. 2010. MetNetGE:Interactive views of biological networks and ontologies.  BMC Bioinformatics  11:469-476 Bais P, Moon SM, He K, Leitao R, Dreher K, Walk T, Sucaet Y, Barkan L, Wohlgemuth G, Roth MR, Wurtele ES, Dixon P, Fiehn O, Lange BM, Shulaev V, Sumner LW, Welti R, Nikolau BJ, Rhee SY, Dickerson JA. 2010. PlantMetabolomics.org: a web portal for plant metabolomics experiments. Plant Physiol. 152:1807-1816. Epub 2010 Feb 10. Wurtele ES, Bassham DC, Dickerson J, Kabala DJ, Schneller W, Stenerson M, Vasanth A. 2010. Meta!Blast: A serious game to explore the complexities of cell and metabolic biology. Proceedings of the ASME 2010 World Conference on Innovative Virtual Reality. WINVR2010
  • Lalone CA, Huang N, Rizshsky L, Yum MY, Singh N, Hauck C, Nikolau BJ, Wurtele ES, Kohut ML, Murphy PA, Birt DF.  2010.Enrichment of Echinacea angustifolia with Bauer alkylamide 11 and Bauer ketone 23 increased anti-inflammatory potential through interference with cox-2 enzyme activity. J Agric Food Chem. 58:8573-84. PMID: 20681645
  • Oliver, D.J. / Nikolau, B.J. / Wurtele, E.S. 2009. Life at the metabolic nexus. Plant Science, 176:597-601.
  • Jia M, Swaminathan S, Wurtele E, Dickerson J, 2009. MetNetGE: Visualizing Biological Networks in Hierarchical Views and 3D Tiered Layouts. IEEE Computer Society Proceedings.
  • El Kaissi M, Jia M, Dickerson J, Wurtele ES, Reiners D. 2009. Reaction centric layout for metabolic networks. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag.
  • El Kaissi M, Jia M, Dickerson J, Wurtele ES, Reiners D. 2009.Visualization of gene regulatory networks. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag. Perera A, Choi SY, Wurtele ES, Nikolau BJ. 2009. Quantitative analysis of acyl-coenzyme As in plant tissues by an LC-MS-MS electrospray ionization method. Chromatography B. Available online 1/09 .
  • Zhai Z, Haney DM, Wu L, Solco AK, Murphy PA, Wurtele ES, Kohut ML, Cunnick JE. 2009. Alcohol extract of Echinacea pallida reverses stress-delayed wound healing in mice. Phytomedicine. Mar 19. [Epub ahead of print] .
  • Senchina DS, McCann DA, Flinn GN, Wu L, Zhai Z, Cunnick JE, Wurtele ES, Kohut ML. 2009. Echinacea tennesseensis ethanol tinctures harbor cytokine- and proliferation-enhancing capacities. Cytokine. Mar 13. [Epub ahead of print] .
  • Zhai Z, Solco A, Wu L, Wurtele ES, Kohut ML, Murphy PA, Cunnick JE. 2009. Echinacea increases arginase activity and has anti-inflammatory properties in RAW 264.7 macrophage cells indicative of alternative macrophage activation. J Ethnopharmacol 122:76-85.
  • Li L, Foster C, Gan Q, Nettleton D, James MG, Myers AM, Wurtele ES. 2009. Identification of the Novel Protein QQS as a Component of the Starch Metabolic Network in Arabidopsis Leaves. Plant Journal. Online 2/09 http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/121641416/HTMLSTART .
  • Berleant D, Zhang L, Jing Ding J, Cao T, Xu J, Fulmer A, Wurtele ES. 2009. Text Empirics-Based Mining of Biomolecular Interactions from Texts: Theory and Application. In press.
  • Birt DF, Widrlechner MP, LaLone CA, Wu L, Bae J, Solco AK, Kraus GA, Murphy PA, Wurtele ES, Leng Q, Hebert SC, Maury WJ, Price JP . 2008. Echinacea in infection. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 87(suppl):488S-492S.
  • Hammer, K.D.P., Hillwig, M.L., Neighbors, J.D., Sim, Y-J., Kohut, M, Wiemer, D.F. Wurtele, E.S., and Birt, D.F . 2008. Pseudohypericin is necessary for light-activated inhibition of prostaglandin E2 pathways by Hypericum perforatum. Phytochemistry .
  • Wu L, Dixon PM, Nikolau BJ, Kraus GA, Widrlechner MP, Wurtele ES. 2008. Metabolic Profiling of Echinacea Genotypes and a Test of Alternative Taxonomic Treatments. Planta Medica. Epub 2008 Dec 19 75:178-183.
  • Birt, D.F., Widrlechner, M.P., Hammer, K.D.P., Hillwig, M.L., Wei, J., Kraus, G.A., Murphy, P.A., McCoy, J., Wurtele, E.S., Neighbors, J.D., Wiemer, D.F., Maury, W.J., and Price, J.P. 2008. Hypericum in Infection: Identification of Anti-viral and Anti-inflammatory Constituents. J. Ethnopharmacology submitted.
  • Berleant D, Ding J, Hughes L, Fulmer A, Wurtele ES, Viswanathan K, Schnable PS . 2008. PathBinderH: a tool for sentence-focused, plant taxonomy-sensitive access to the biological literature. chapter 5 in G. P. Rao, C. Wagner & R. K. Singh, eds., Application of Genomics and Bioinformatics in Plants, Studium Press LLC, Houston :pp 121-136.
  • Kher S, Peng J, Wurtele ES, Dickerson J . 2008. A Symbolic Approach to Evidence Code Mapping for Biological Data Integration and Subjective Analysis for Reference Associations for Metabolic Pathways. NAFIPS 2008. Special Biosciences Section:1-6 .
  • Hillwig ML, Hammer KD, Birt DF, Wurtele ES. 2008. Characterizing the metabolic fingerprint and anti-inflammatory activity of Hypericum gentianoides. J Agric Food Chem 56:4359-4366.
  • Cha S, Zhang H, Ilarslan HI, Wurtele ES, Brachova L, Nikolau BJ, Yeung ES. 2008. Direct profiling and imaging of plant metabolites in intact tissues by using colloidal graphite-assisted laser desorption ionization (GALDI) mass spectrometry. Plant Journal. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/120123728/HTMLSTART 55:348-360.
  • Lawrence M, Cook D, Lee EK, Babka H, Wurtele ES. 2008. explorase: Multivariate Exploratory Analysis and Visualization. 25Apr http://www.jstatsoft.org/v25/i09 .
  • Mentzen W, Peng JL, Nikolau BJ, Wurtele ES. 2008. Articulation of Core Metabolic Processes in Arabidopsis. BMC Plant Biology. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2229/8/76 8:76.
  • Mentzen W, Wurtele ES. 2008. Regulon Organization of Arabidopsis. BMC Plant Biology. Sept 30 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2229/8/99 highly accessed article 8:99.
  • Gatlin DM, Barrows FT, Brown P, Dabrowski K, Gaylord TG, Hardy RW, Herman E, Hu G, Krogdah J, Nelson R, Overturf K, Rust M, Sealey W, Skonberg D, Souza EJ, Stone D, Wilson R Wurtele E. 2007. Expanding the utilization of sustainable plant products in aquafeeds: a review. Aquaculture Research 38:551-579.
  • Wurtele ES, Li L, Berleant D, Cook D, Dickerson JA, Ding J, Hofmann H, Lawrence M, Lee EK, Li J, Mentzen W, Miller L, Nikolau BJ, Ransom N, Wang Y . 2007. “MetNet: Systems Biology Software for Arabidopsis.”. In: Concepts in Plant Metabolomics. Springer :145-158.
  • LaLone C, Hammer K, Wu L, Bae J, Layva N, Liu Y, Sia-Solco A, Kraus G, Murphy P, Wurtele ES, Kim OK, Seo K, Widrlechner MP, Birt DF. 2007. Echinacea species and alkamides inhibit prostaglandin E2 production in RAW264.7 mouse macrophage cells. J Agric Food Chem 55:7314-7322.
  • Kraus GA, J Bae J, Wu L, Wurtele ES. 2007. The Synthesis and Natural Distribution of the Major Ketone Constituents in Echinacea pallida. Molecules 12:406-414.
  • Cook D., Hofmann H., Nikolau B., Wurtele ES, Lee Eun-kyung, Yang H. 2007. Exploring gene expressions using plots. J Data Science 5:151-181.
  • Li Ling, Ilarslan HH, James MG, Myers AM, Wurtele ES . 2007. Genome wide co-expression among the starch debranching enzyme genes AtISA1, AtISA2, and AtISA3 in Arabidopsis thaliana. J Exp Bot 58:3323-3342.
  • Call AB, Hernnstadt S, Dickerson J, Wurtele ES, Bassham D. 2007. Virtual Cell: A Pedagogical Convergence between Game Design and Science Education. Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics 5:27-31.
  • Wurtele ES et al. 2007. MetNet: Systems Biology Tools for Arabidopsis. In Concepts in Plant Metabolomics. Publisher: Springer Verlag :145-156.
  • Nikolau BJ, Wurtele ES. (Editors). 2007. Concepts in Plant Metabolomics. Publisher: Springer. 297 pgs .
  • Zhai Z, Liu Y, Wu L, Senchina DS, Wurtele ES, Murphy PA, Kohut ML, Cunnick JE. 2007. Enhancement of innate and adaptive immune functions by multiple Echinacea species. Journal of Medicinal Food 10(3):423-434.
  • Zhai Z, Haney D, Wu L, Solco AK, Murphy PA, Wurtele ES, Kohut ML, Cunnick JE. 2007. Alcohol extracts of Echinacea inhibit production of NO and TNF-α by macrophages in vitro. Journal of Food and Agricultural Immunology 18:221-236.
  • Hammer KDP, Hillwig ML, Solco AK, Dixon PM, Delate K, Murphy PA, Wurtele ES, Birt DF. 2007. Inhibition of PGE2 Production by Anti-Inflammatory Hypericum perforatum Extracts and Constituents in RAW264.7 Mouse Macrophage Cells. Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry 55:7323-7331.
  • Xia T, Li J, Wurtele ES, Gu X. 2007. A tool for comprehensive analysis of protein interaction networks. In BIOCOMP 2007. Eds. Arabnia HR, Yang MQ, Yang JY :pp 523-527.
  • Wurtele ES, Ling Li, Dan Berleant, Dianne Cook, Julie A. Dickerson, Jing Ding, Heike Hofmann, Michael Lawrence, Eun-kyung Lee, Jie Li, Wieslawa Mentzen, Leslie Miller, Basil J. Nikolau, Nick Ransom, Yingjun Wang. 2007. MetNet: Systems Biology Software for Arabidopsis. In Concepts in Plant Metabolomics, Springer Verlag In press.
  • Call, AB, Herrnstadt, S, Wurtele, ES and Bassham D. 2006. Virtual Cell: A Pedagogical Convergence between Game Design and Science Education. 4th International Conference on Education and Information Systems, Technologies and Applications Orlando, FL, USA .
  • Ding J, Hughes L, Berleant D, Fulmer A, Wurtele ES. 2006. PubMed Assistant: A Biologist-Friendly Interface for Enhanced PubMed Search. Bioinformatics 22:378–380.
  • Yang Y, Wurtele ES, Cruz-Neira C, and Dickerson JA. 2006. Hierarchical visualization of metabolic networks using virtual reality. In Proc. ACM Intl. Conf. on Virtual Reality Continuum and Its Applications (Hong Kong, China). VRCIA '06. ACM Press, New York, NY :377-381.
  • Kraus GA, Bae J, Wu L, Wurtele ES. 2006. Synthesis and Natural Distribution of Anti-inflammatory Alkamides from Echinacea.. Molecules 11:758-767.
  • Senchina DS, Wu L, Flinn GN, Konopka del N, McCoy JA, Widrelechner MP, Wurtele ES, Kohut ML. 2006. Year-and-a-Half Old, Dried Echinacea Roots Retain Cytokine-Modulating Capabilities in an in vitro Human Older Adult Model of Influenza Vaccination. Planta Med 72:1440-1447.
  • Du P, Gong J, Wurtele ES, Dickerson JA. 2005. Modeling Gene Expression Networks using Fuzzy Logic. 2005 IEEE Trans. On Systems, Man and Cybernetics Part B. 35:1351-1359.
  • Fatland B, Nikolau BJ, Wurtele ES. 2005. Reverse Genetic Characterization of Cytosolic Acetyl-CoA Generation by ATP-citrate lyase in Arabidopsis. Plant Cell 17:182-203.
  • Ding J, Viswanathan K, Berleant D, Hughes L, Wurtele ES, Ashlock D, Dickerson JA, Fulmer A, Schnable PS. 2005. Using the Biological Taxonomy to Access Biological Literature with PathBinderH. Bioinformatics 21:2560-2562.
  • DeCook R, Nettleton D, Foster CM, Wurtele ES. 2005. Identifying differentially expressed genes in unreplicated multiple-treatment microarray timecourse experiments. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis In press:http://www.stat.unipg.it/IASC/Misc-stat-journ-CSDA.
  • Yang Y, Engin L, Wurtele ES, Cruz-Neira C, Dickerson JA. 2005. Integration of metabolic networks and gene expression in virtual reality. Bioinformatics 21:3645-3650.
  • Dickerson JA, Berleant DA, Du P, Ding J, Foster CM, Ling L, Wurtele ES. 2005. Creating modeling abnd visualizing metabolic networks. In Medical Informatics, Eds. H Chen, SS Fuller, C Friedman, W Hirsch, Springer Verlag :491-518.
  • Nikolau BJ, Fien O, Wurtele ES. 2005. Plant Metabolomics. Kluwer Academic Publishers .
  • Dickerson JA, Berleant DA, Du P, Ding J, Foster CM, Ling L, Wurtele ES. 2004. Using virtual reality to understand complex metabolic networks. Atlantic Symposium Comp Biol Genomic Info Systems Technol :950-953.
  • Dickerson JD, Du P, Wurtele ES, Li J. 2004. Fuzzy modeling of metabolic maps in MetNetDB. Fuzzy Information NAFIPS 1(http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/abs_free.jsp?arNumb):175-179.
  • Wu L, Bae J, Kraus G, Wurtele ES. 2004. Diacetylenic isobutylamides of Echinacea: Synthesis and natural distribution. Phytochemistry 65:2477-2484.
  • Bino RJ, Hall RD, Fiehn O, Kopka J, Saito K, Draper J, Nikolau BJ, Mendes P, Roessner-Tunali U, Beale MH, Trethewey RN, Lange BM, Wurtele ES, Sumner LW. 2004. Potential of metabolomics as a functional genomics tool. Trends Plant Sci 9:418-425.
  • Jenkins H, Hardy N, Beckmann M, Draper J, Smith AR, Taylor J, Fiehn O, Goodacre R, Bino R, Hall R, Kopka J, Lange BM, Liu JR, Mendes P, Nikolau BJ, Oliver SG, Paton NW, Roessner-Tunali U, Saito K, Smedsgaard J, Sumner LW, Wurtele ES, Kell DB. 2004. A proposed framework for the description of plant metabolomics experiments and their results. Nature Biotech 22:1601-1606.
  • Dickerson JA, Berleant, D, Cox Z, Qi, W, Ashlock D, Wurtele ES, Fulmer AW. 2003. Creating and Modeling Metabolic and Regulatory Networks Using Text Mining and Expert Knowledge. In, Computational Biology and Genome Informatics, edited by Cathy H. Wu, Paul Wang, Jason T. L. Wang, World Scientific .
  • Nikolau BJ, Ohlrogge JB, Wurtele ES. 2003. Plant Biotin-Containing Carboxylases. Arch Biochem Biophys 414:211-222.
  • Wurtele ES, Dickerson JD, Cook D, Hofmann H, Li J, Diao L. 2003. MetNet: software to build and model the biogenetic lattice of Arabidopsis. Comparative and Functional Genomics 4:239-245.
  • Oliver DJ, Nikolau BJ. Wurtele ES. 2002. Functional Genomics: High throughput mRNA, protein, and metabolite analyses. Metabolic Engineering 4:98-108.
  • Fatland BF, Ke J, Anderson M, Mentzen W, Cui LW, Allred C, Johnston JL, Nikolau BJ, Wurtele ES. 2002. Molecular Characterization of a Novel Heteromeric ATP-Citrate Lyase that Generates Cytosolic Acetyl-CoA in Arabidopsis. Plant Physiol. 130:740-756.
  • Ding J, Berleant D, Nettleton D, E. Wurtele ES. 2002. Mining Medline: Abstracts, sentences, or phrases?. Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing pp. 1-12.
  • Lee E-K, Cook D, Hofmann H, Eve Wurtele, Dongshin Kim, Jihong Kim, and Hogeun An. GeneGobi : Visual Data Analysis Tools For Microarray Data. COMPSTAT’2004 Symposium. Physica-Verlag/Springer 2004.