Futures in Biotech 34

Mark Gerstein endeavors to make sense our genome on its past and present course.

Our guest is Mark Gerstein, the Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics, a professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and professor of Computer Science at Yale University Gerstein Lab.

In past shows, we've had Lee hood, the inventor of the DNA sequencer, and George Church who was among those personally involved in initiating the Human project. But getting the code and really understanding these human blueprints are entirely different problems. Our guest today, Mark Gerstein, is trying to make sense of it all, and his work amoung other things has revealed that the genome is more than just a blueprint, or list of parts, but a rich historical text about our past.

BLAST this sequence: atgttcc tgtccttccc caccaccaag acctacttcc cgcacttcga cctgagccac ggctctgccc aggttaaggg ccacggcaag aaggtggccg acgcgctgac caacgccgtg gcgcacgtgg acgacatgcc caacgcgctg tccgccctga gcgacctgca cgcgcacaag cttcgggtgg acccggtcaa cttcaagctc ctaa

Instructions: Copy and Paste the DNA sequence into the query window, and hit the blast button. What does this encode? Interesting: Try again selecting the NON-HUMAN database. What organism is the exact same gene found in? Why?

Audible pick of the week: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Unabridged, By Tim Weiner, Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. For your free audio book visit Audible.com/biotech.

TWiT T-Shirts from Lori LeBeau Walsh.

Transcripts to the shows are now available on the FiB Blog thanks to the kind folks at PodsinPrint.

Also thanks to Philippe Pelletier and Will Hall for the great themes.

Thanks to CacheFly for providing the bandwidth for this netcast.