Deciphering the Genomic Rosetta Stone
- Speaker
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Rob Phillips, Ph.D.Fred and Nancy Morris Professor of Biophysics, Physics and Biology, California Institute of Technology
The 2024 lecture series in biology is “Dynamics of Life”; Motion, change and interaction are constants of biology. They are ubiquitous, linking life’s various scales from fluid flows inside cells to the flocking patterns of birds. In these lectures, scientists will discuss their exploration of the dynamical mechanisms at the core of biological phenomena through the lenses of theory, simulation and observation.
2024 Lecture Series Themes
Mathematics and Computer Science: Machine Learning in the Natural Sciences
Presidential Lectures are free public colloquia centered on four main themes: Biology, Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Neuroscience and Autism Science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are intended to foster discourse and drive discovery among the broader NYC-area research community. We invite those interested in the topic to join us for this weekly lecture series.
Sequencing the genomic material of living organisms can be likened to using telescopes to peer into the universe’s past. By studying genetics, we can glean information about the evolutionary history of life on Earth. In this Presidential Lecture, Rob Phillips will present examples of such research, from how frogs arrived on oceanic islands in the Gulf of Guinea to the emergence of toothless whales tens of millions of years ago.
Currently, the NIH Databases report roughly 100 quadrillion nucleotides of genomic information. But despite the great successes of genomic science, we still know very little about gene regulation, even in well-studied species. Phillips will describe a strategy to overcome this regulatory ignorance. Specifically, he will show how, using a combination of tools from modern molecular biology, we can go from complete regulatory ignorance of a gene of interest to actionable knowledge of how that gene is turned on and off. But then what? The second part of his talk will focus on how, by using the tools of physics, we can predict the input-output properties of these newly discovered regulatory architectures. Such predictions provide a sense of how all living organisms deploy different genes in space and time to respond to the world around them. They offer a strategy for rewiring cells for bioengineering.