Sorry for the delay on the blog. I will try to update it over the weekend. For those that are looking for Dr. Capecchi's paper it can be found at

http://www.cell.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867410003740

If you would like a copy let me know.

Best,

Marc

Host: Marc Pelletier, Ph.D.

Guest: Julian Stelzer, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, Case Western Reserve University

Julian joins us to talk about heart biotechnology. He reviews two papers which are great examples of innovation in this field.

Here are the papers that are discussed:

Shen et al. 2010

Cutler et al. 2009

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Host: Marc Pelletier

Guests: Dave Brodbeck, Ph.D., Andre Nantel, Ph.D., Vincent Racaniello, Ph.D., and George Farr, Ph.D.

In this episode, a panel of scientists discuss recent stories including face recognition in primates, a new cure for HCV, changing the genetic code from three to four bases, and lastly, interspecies breading between modern humans and neanderthals…

Papers Discussed:

Adachi, I., Chou, D.P., and Hampton, R.R. (2009). Thatcher effect in monkeys demonstrates conservation of face perception across primates. Curr Biol 19: 1270–1273. 

Gao, M. et al. (2010). Chemical genetics strategy identifies an HCV NS5A inhibitor with a potent clinical effect. Nature 465: 96–100.

Gibson, D.G. et al. (2010). Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome. Science .

Green, R. et al. (2010). A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome. Science 328: 710–722.

Neumann, H., Wang, K., Davis, L., Garcia-Alai, M., and Chin, J.W. (2010). Encoding multiple unnatural amino acids via evolution of a quadruplet-decoding ribosome. Nature 464: 441–444.

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Host: Marc Pelletier

Guest: Michael Vucelic, former Apollo system manager for NASA and Rockwell

It was an honor and a pleasure to discuss the Apollo Missions with the Spaceship Analyst from Apollo. Mr. Vucelic won the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in saving the lives of Apollo 13, and he gives us a from the floor of Mission Control.

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Interesting images

Hosts: Marc Pelletier, Ph.D. and Vincent Racaniello, Ph.D.

Guest: Dickson Despommier, Ph.D., Professor of Environmental Health Sciences; Professor of Microbiology, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York, NY. Host of This Week in Virology; Host of This Week in Parasitism.

In this episode, we talk to Columbia University parasitologist Dickson Despommier. We discuss both his work in parasitology and a concept project that could revolutionize farming in the 21st century: vertical farm.

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Hosts: Marc Pelletier and George W. Farr, Ph.D., Vice President of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Aeromics and Adjunct Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Case Western Reserve University

Guests: Susan Lindquist, Ph.D., Professor of Biology at MIT and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Simon Alberti, Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, and Randal Halfmann, a grad student in Dr. Lindquist's lab at MIT.

Drs. Susan Lindquist (MIT), Simon Alberti (Max-Planck), and Randal Halfmann (MIT) talk about how prion proteins (yes, the like the ones that cause mad cow) can act in non-mendelian inheritance: evolution without DNA. This is a paradigm shift in our understanding of evolution. These prion proteins can enable an organism's rapid adaptation to new environments, and thus contribute to evolution at the protein level. It is not just for DNA anymore!

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Hosts: Marc Pelletier and Vincent Racaniello

Guest: Dr. Karla Kirkegaard, Professor and Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Dr. Kirkegaard discusses how her work on Poliovirus has lead to new antiviral strategies designed to outsmart viral drug resistance.

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on iTunes

Hosts: Marc Pelletier and Justin Sanchez, Ph.D.; Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Neuroscience, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida Neuroprosthetics Research Group

Guest: Rahul Sarpeshkar, Ph.D.; Associate Professor, of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. Rahul Sarpeshkar talks about how to improve electronic systems using biologically inspired design, borrowing the best design elements from the living world... This is a sequel discussion (Part II) to FiB 52. 

His book is available here. Every geek should have a copy of this text. It is certainly a thought provoking read.

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Hosts: Marc Pelletier and Leo Laporte

Guest: Dr. George Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Center for Computational Genetics.

We are now at the crossroads of Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Dr. Church is forging the way. Church and his team at the Personal Genome Project hope to sequence 100,000 human genomes within the next few years. These people will be able to make medical decisions based on their molecular anatomy rather than their 'family history'. Moreover, the scientific community will have an enormous database in which they can mine. This will inevitably will lead to a better understanding of the molecular basis of disease. Church and his team will change medicine as we know it.

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Host: Marc Pelletier

Guest: Dr. David Haussler, Professor of Biomolecular Engineering, University of California at Santa Cruz, Director of the Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

We talk with pioneer bioinformatition David Haussler. He and his team assembled the first draft of the human genome. Now he is working on Genome 10k. He explains and how sequencing ten thousand vertebrate genomes will tell us about our past, present, and future.

"We do paleocomputational genomics: our software effort over the last five years or so is focused on taking the genomes that we are sequencing from all of the species that are living on the planet today and working backwards towards what the genomes of their ancestors must of looked like. It's a tremendous opportunity. One way to think about this is the genomes that we see today are like having noisy copies of an ancient text. Imagine that you had this ancient text, and there were pages missing in a few copies, and other copies had smudges and letters changed, or maybe it was copied by hand and the copies were made that had errors in them. If you just had one decedent, one copy from this ancient text, it would be very hard to reconstruct the way the text looked like because of all the changes. But if you made dozens of independent copies of them, such that it's unlikely that the same change was made multiple times in the same place, then you can reconstruct from those copies what the ancient text must have looked like, so for this, the genome of our common ancestor of placental mammals for example, a creature that lived in the late Cretaceous period, about a 100 million years ago, in the shadow of the dinosaurs. That genome is something that we can get a very good picture of by taking all of the placental mammals that are alive today, and working back from their genomes to what must of been that common ancestral genome, and we do that computationally." Dr. David Haussler, January 2010. 

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Hosts: Marc Pelletier, Ph.D., Justin Sanchez, Ph.D., and Mark Griswold, Ph.D.

Guest: Rahul Sarpeshkar, Ph.D., associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Ultra Low Power Bioelectronics: Fundamentals, Biomedical Applications, and Bio-inspired Systems

Dr. Rahul Sarpeshkar takes us into his lab at MIT to discuss (1) bio-inspired electronics, (2) biomedical electronics, and (3) circuit modeling of biology… If you think quad core hyperthreaing i7s are cool, wait until your motherboard actually has a brain…

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Host: Marc Pelletier, Ph.D. 

Guest: Mark Griswold, Ph.D.

Dr. Griswold explains how MRIs work in way that even I can understand! It is all about nuclear spin man, it's about the spin.

Notes and slides from the show

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Host: Marc Pelletier, Ph.D.

Panelists: George Farr, Ph.D., Dave Brodbeck, Ph.D., Justin Sanchez Ph.D., and Vincent Racaniello Ph.D.

Marc and some the FiB regulars cover important stories in the biotechnology realm.

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Hosts: Dr. Marc Pelletier and Dr. Kirsten Sanford

Guest: Dr. Justin Sanchez Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Neuroscience, and Biomedical Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida

Dr. Justin Sanchez walks us through the technology of brain machine interfaces. 

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Dr. Delong discusses the use of metagenomics to understand microbial life in the Pacific Ocean.

Hosts: Marc Pelletier, Ph.D., Andre Nantel, Ph.D.

Guest: Ed Delong, Ph.D.

 "This genomic information can now be rapidly and generically extracted from the genomes of co-occurring microbes in natural habitats, using standard genomic technologies. We are now exploring and applying these and related technologies, to better describe and exploit the genetic, biochemical, and metabolic potential that is contained in the natural microbial world." Dr. Ed Delong, MIT  

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Dr. Oliver Smithies discusses the present and future of genetic engineering

Host: Dr. Marc Pelletier,  Dr. Andre Nantel 

Guest: Dr. Oliver Smithies - Professor Dept. of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, UNC Chapel Hill, NC; 2007 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine

 This is the second half of a two part series. In Part I, we discussed Dr. Smithies enormous contribution to modern medicine through his invention: specific gene targeting in the genetically engineered mouse. In this episode, we discuss the present and future of applied genetics

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Hosts: Marc Pelletier and Dave Brodbeck

Guest: Terrence Sejnowski of the Salk Institute

An interview with Dr. Terrence Sejnowski about theoretical and computational biology and neurobiology. He explains how the mind works, and how we may not only interface with it one day, but also how it may be simulated computationally.

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Hosts: Marc Pelletier

Guest: Dr. Oliver Smithies; Professor, Department of Pathology and Lab Medicine University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

I talk with Dr. Oliver Smithies, 2007 Nobel Laureate, and father of mammalian genetic engineering.

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Dr. John Gabrieli (MIT) explores memory, thoughts, and emotion by fMRI...

Hosts: Marc Pelletier, Dave Brodbeck

Guest: John Gabrieli; Grover Herman Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

What does the statement:"I think, therefore I am" used by Rene Descartes really mean? What if you could look into the human mind with the most sophisticated instrumentation available? Well in brief, this is what John Gabrieli does in his lab at MIT. He studies memory, thought, and emotion by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. If only Descartes had an fMRI in the1630-40s!

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HOSTS: Marc Pelletier, Vincent Racaniello, Andre Nantel, Justin Sanchez, and Dave Brodbeck.

From wooly mammoths, to cybernetics, and controlling your computer with your brain, a panel discusses the recent big stories in bioscience.

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