September 2009

The IGSP's Education Office is hosting its first annual IGSP Explorations Week, with daily events from September 14th-18th. The event will bring together students, postdocs, faculty and staff to explore the potential of the genome sciences and to learn about and take advantage of opportunities at the IGSP for research, education, professional development, and discovery.

The week kicks off with a Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training workshop for graduate students and postdocs led by Tomalei Vess on setting expectations and resolving conflict in mentoring relationships. Other highlights include "IGSP Faculty at a Glance," where IGSP Investigators and Members will give lightning-fast and entertaining overviews of their ongoing research projects. On Wednesday, Charmaine Royal will launch the Genomes@4 seminar series with a talk entitled "Biomedical Research in the 21st Century: What's race got to do with it?" Students and others can relax with a good movie and good conversation with Bob Cook-Deegan later that evening.

A career panel will provide tips on how to succeed in interdisciplinary research, and the year's first Science & Society journal club will feature Sheril Kirshenbaum, who is the Duke co-author of "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future" and a founder of Science Debate 2008. The week will come to a close with free, locally made ice cream in the F-CIEMAS Atrium on Friday afternoon.

Please join us in the festivities and encourage others to come along. Full details of the schedule are available here.

Getting Clinical Trials On Track
In a News & Observer op-ed, Susanne Haga says that discouraging clinical trials statistics also point to an opportunity for patients to speed the pace of discovery.

Genes Tied to Gap in Treatment of Hepatitis C
A Duke team led by David Goldstein, John McHutchison and Dongliang Ge found that a single letter change in the human genome makes all the difference in people's response to a grueling, 48-week course of drugs used to treat hepatitis C, according to a report in The New York Times. The finding was also featured by Bloomberg, Reuters and U.S. News & World Report. Read the original report in Nature.

Genetic Test Detects Infections Before Symptoms Appear
Flu sufferers of the future may not have to wait until their fever spikes to learn they’re ill, Steve Sternberg reported in USA Today. An interdisciplinary team led by Geoff Ginsburg says they’ve developed an experimental genetic test that may detect infection before symptoms appear. The findings were also featured by Reuters, WRAL, The News & Observer and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Read the original report in the journal Cell Host & Microbe.

Research Trove: Patients' Online Data
Bob Cook-Deegan told The New York Times that databases of genetic profiles held by personal genomics companies like 23andMe could be a valuable resource for researchers needing to recruit huge numbers of patients quickly.

GrassRoots Biotechnology Sees Dollar$ in Green Growth
An N.C. Biotechnology article features GrassRoots Biotechnology, a startup company co-founded by the IGSP's Philip Benfey.

GENOME: The Future is Now
Produced by Necessary Films, this first in a series of documentary "webisodes" about Harvard’s PGP-10 prominently features IGSP Investigator Misha Angrist.

Toward Earlier Detection of Ovarian Cancer
A new study "confirms that ovarian-cancer risk is partly determined by genetic variants present in a large number of women," Andrew Berchuck told The Wall Street Journal.

Ensuring the Safe Use of Genomic Medicine in Children
In Clinical Pediatrics, Susanne Haga and Sharon Terry advocate the use of genomic risk profiling to identify children at increased risk who would benefit from early intervention, but recognize that its integration in clinical practice for this population will require a more nuanced approach to delivery and follow-up.

Circular Polymerase Extension Cloning of Complex Gene Libraries and Pathways
In PLoS One, Jingdong Tian and Jiayuan Quan elucidate the circular polymerase extension cloning reaction mechanism and demonstrate its usage in demanding synthetic biology applications such as one-step assembly and cloning of complex combinatorial libraries and multi-component pathways.

Gene Expression Profiles of Tumor Biology Provide a Novel Approach to Prognosis and May Guide the Selection of Therapeutic Targets in Multiple Myeloma
Anil Potti and colleagues report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology on gene expression profiling studies with microarray data aimed to better dissect the molecular phenotypes, sensitivity to particular chemotherapeutic agents, and prognoses of Monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance and multiple myeloma.

Comparative Embryology without a Microscope
In a Journal of Biology minireview, Greg Wray and David Garfield discuss recent studies that have taken a genomic approach to the classical problems of developmental conservation and change.

Katie Garman, an MD who has spent the last two years as a fellow in Anil Potti’s lab, officially joined the IGSP as an Investigator on August 12th. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine and plans to pursue genomic strategies for the evaluation of premalignant conditions of the gastrointestinal tract. Welcome, Katie!

The Duke Center for Systems Biology and IGSP have announced the 4th Annual Duke Systems Biology Symposium, to be held on campus on Friday, October 2nd. Attendance is free and open to all, but registration is required.

The first issue of GenomeLIFE for the '09-'10 academic year will hit the stands later this month. It will be a special issue featuring the many ways that Duke researchers are applying genomic tools to tackle infectious diseases, from mosquito-borne illnesses to hepatitis C.

The National Institute of Health has announced funding for research and developments in biomedical informatics and computational biology that will support rapid progress in areas of scientific opportunity in biomedical research.

The National Human Genome Research Institute will fund educational programs and training initiatives aimed at spreading new information and approaches.

For full details and the latest updates on IGSP seminars and events, see the Events Calendar

A selection of upcoming events:

Wednesday, September 2nd
Systems Biology Seminar
Guang Yao presents "Essential Regulatory Features Underlying the Rb-E2F Switch that Controls Mammalian Cell Cycle Entry".

Tuesday, September 8th
Genome Biology Meeting
New IGSP Investigator Nick Buchler presents "Bait and Switch: How protein sequestration generates a flexible threshold response in genetic networks."

Tuesday, September 8th
Tuesday Seminar Series
Meng Chen presents.

Wednesday, September 9th
Genome Academy
Genomes 101 is back with Terry Furey introducing genome browsers and databases.

Wednesday, September 9th
Computational Biology Seminar
Megan Owen from NC State will present "A Fast Algorithm for Computing Geodesic Distances in Tree".

Monday, September 14th
IGSP Explorations Week
The weeklong IGSP event begins.

Wednesday, September 16th
Genomes@4
Charmaine Royal presents the first seminar of the series as part of IGSP Explorations Week. Her talk is entitled "Biomedical Research in the 21st Century: What’s race got to do with it?"

ARRA Update: The National Institutes of Health has awarded Bruce Donald with a grant in support of the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (CBB) Training Program.

Anil Potti and Saiaowen David Hsu were awarded a 2009 Translational grant from The V Foundation for Cancer Research to develop a paraffin-based assay to predict patients with early stage colorectal cancer at high risk for recurrence.

Geoff Ginsburg was invited to join the Advisory Board of a new interdisciplinary journal, Science Translational Medicine, published by Science/AAAS. The first issue is scheduled to publish this fall.