U.S. News and World Report has declared that an Iowa State professor has one of the hottest jobs.

In the magazine’s Nov. 1 issue, an article titled “21 Hot Tracks for the 21st Century: Have We Got the Job for You” features James Cornette, ISU professor of mathematics, as a success in agriculture’s fastest-growing field: bioinformatics.

“As the importance of manipulating plant genes grows, so does the need for scientists like James Cornette of Iowa State University,” said U.S. News and World Report of the director of the Laurence H. Baker Center in the new Plant Sciences Institute.

“A ‘bioinformaticist,’ Cornette uses computers to sort through data in search of relevant patterns in a plant’s gene map,” the article continues.

Cornette said he has a more difficult time giving a basic definition of bioinformatics. A lot of the meaning depends on the person using the word, but the basic meaning entails DNA.

“Bioinformatics is the science discovering and interpretation from the multiple data sets related to DNA protein sequence, structure and DNA protein functions,” he said. “The work that I have done has mostly been in respect to the proteins involved in the immune system.”

The new field encompasses many different areas and is used in several ways.

ISU currently is seeking to fill six faculty positions with experts in bioinformatics from the departments of mathematics, statistics, zoology and genetics, computer science and physics.

“Dr. Cornette has been instrumental in pulling his group of faculty together and responsible for generating a lot of the excitement,” said Dan Voytas, associate professor of zoology and genetics.

Interest in bioinformatics has greatly increased in the past two to three years, Voytas said, and Cornette has played an important role in generating that interest.

“Biologists started to realize that we need mathematicians and computer scientists to tell you what all the information means,” Voytas said.

Human genome projects will have an important impact in this area, Cornette said.

From the large quantities of information interpreted and the choice of how to use or not use the given information, serious implications affecting medical, economic and certain ethical issues will be raised, he said.

“The excitement lies in what is in store for the center being developed,” Cornette said.

Today there is an advisory meeting being held to define the role of the center. Future plans include methods for multiple database interpretations and parallel computation processes.

“One of the functions of the [Baker] center is to be a service to the other database interpretation resources for the university,” he said.

Cornette teaches calculus and differential equation courses for biological and computation sciences.

A Web site recently has been created for questions concerning the bioinformatics and biological statistics field at http://www.bioinformatics.iastate.edu.