GCB News

Here are summaries of a selection of the papers published by GCB faculty in November 2019:

Each year, the Web of Science Group identifies the world’s most influential researchers. The select few who have been most frequently cited by their peers over the last decade. In 2019, fewer than 6,300, or 0.1%, of the world's researchers, across 21 research fields, have earned this exclusive distinction.

Hosted by the Woo Center for Big Data and Precision Medicine, directed by GCB faculty member Xiling Shen, the new conference brought together leaders in data-driven approaches to improving health.

Bullies may come and go, but the ‘molecular memory’ of being a target lingers.

A Q&A with Charles Gersbach

When Lingchong You earned his PhD in chemical engineering in 2002, synthetic biology was in its infancy. Yet he was drawn to the field right away.

“Synthetic biology to me is just like programming,” You says. “Every cell is like a computer. In this case the code is in the form of DNA.”

Highlights to the current issue include

We’ve all had dreams of having superpowers. Maybe you’ve wished you could fly, have x-ray vision, read minds or teleport. While those dreams may never become reality, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is hoping to give people a different kind of superpower: protection from potentially lethal health threats. And the Duke Center for Advanced Genomic Technologies will help.

A new study demonstrates that DNA metabarcoding provides a promising new method for tracking human plant intake, suggesting that similar approaches could be used to characterize the animal and fungal components of human diets. The study, published in the journal mSystems, demonstrated that dietary plant DNA can be amplified and sequenced from human stool using methods commonly applied to wildlife studies.
 

Neural networks cut modeling times of complex biological circuits to enable new insights into their inner workings.