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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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.
]]>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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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
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.
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.
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
]]>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
]]>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.