Abstract:
It has now become cheap and easy to sequence genomes – we can sequence a microbe almost for free, or a human for a few hundred dollars. But what do these genomes say? We know that they contain the information necessary to make us who we are, but we don’t yet understand exactly how. I will talk about what we have learned so far about how to read the language of the genome, and about the methods we are using to improve our ability to translate, from experimental methods we use to sequence and read the raw genetic code to statistical methods that attempt to predict how these genotypes affect phenotype. I will also talk about how we can now use this understanding to move from reading genomes to writing them.
About the Speaker:
Michael Desai is a Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and of Physics at Harvard University. His research focuses on understanding the signatures that natural selection and other evolutionary forces leave in the genetic variation within and between populations. His lab uses a combination of theoretical and experimental approaches to study how this genetic variation is created and maintained, and to develop methods to infer the evolutionary history of populations from the variation observed in sequence data, with a primary focuses on natural selection in microbes and viruses.
Supported by Arista Networks India Pvt. Ltd