Today, Chris Sander, head of the Computational Biology Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), gave a talk at The Genome Center. His group at MSKCC performs a wide variety of research on cancer, covering a wide range of biological scales. His talk today spanned this wide range of scales, from interpreting SNPs to modeling cellular pathways of cancer. Thanks to the central dogma of molecular biology, single-nucleotide polymorphisms can readily be translated to... Full Post
The Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) recently announced the completion of the first whole genome sequence of a Han Chinese individual. The genome, which they named YH, was generated from DNA donated by an individual that works at BGI. They generated over 117 Gb of data, of which nearly 103 Gb mapped back to the human reference genome, covering well over 99% of the reference. They were able to find over 3 millions SNPs, about 135,000... Full Post
Recently, The Genome Center's Dr. Elaine Mardis gave a talk at the Cold Spring Harbor's Personal Genomes meeting. The topic of the talk was the ever increasing efforts of the genomics community to understand the molecular nature of cancer. In this blog, I have discussed projects like The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Tumor Sequencing Project (TSP), but what are we actually doing in these projects to try to better understand and, ultimately, cure cancer?... Full Post
Now that we are three weeks away from the election, the polls are actually worth looking at (that is, of course, if you are interested in that sort of thing). The Gallup Daily Tracking Poll is updated daily at about 1 p.m. EDT. NPR and CNN have interactive maps with the current state of the Electoral College. If you are more interested in multiple polls being mashed together into some unholy algorithm to produce a... Full Post
If lately you have been asking yourself, "Just who is Barack Obama?" or, for that matter, "Who is John McCain?", you have an excellent opportunity to find out. Tonight, Frontline is airing their quadrennial, in-depth look at the major party presidential candidates in their special The Choice 2008. You can watch it in its entirety (two hours) below. Also, don't forget that the final debate is tomorrow night. You can also download the show for... Full Post