all George Church stories

When genetics gets personal

404132862 — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:38:04 -0400

Just five years after the Human Genome Project announced it had decoded the first human DNA, the era of personal genetics is dawning, bringing with it not just the promise of targeted, personalized medicine and a new level of self-knowledge, but also a host of ethical, legal, and practical issues. A new project out of a Harvard Medical School genetics lab is trying to make sure we’re prepared to deal with the potential benefits and pitfalls arising from these issues.

NHGRI/NIH awards team $6.5M to advance DNA sequencing using Nanopores

404132862 — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:27:03 -0400

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), awarded a $6.5 (over 4 years) grant to a team of Harvard University researchers to further develop electronic sequencing in nanopores. The grant is part of more than $20 million in total funding
given by NHGRI/NIH to spur innovative sequencing technologies inexpensive and efficient enough to sequence a person's DNA as a routine part of biomedical research and health care.

J. Craig Venter named visiting scholar

404132862 — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:22:11 -0500

J. Craig Venter, the visionary biologist and intellectual entrepreneur who was a leading figure in the decoding of the human genome, will join Harvard University as a visiting scholar at the University’s Origins of Life Initiative.

Venter, who left his last academic post in 1982, is founder and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute. He accepted the one-year appointment last week (Feb. 22). It starts March 1.

Bulyk searches for DNA on-off switches

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:22:53 -0400

Martha Bulyk held what looked like an ordinary glass slide up to the large window that is much of one wall of her Harvard Medical School office. The slide seemed to be blank, but a puff of breath exposed row after row of tiny dots, appearing like the hidden writing of a secret message.

But the dots are more decoder ring than secret code, an array made up of bits of DNA that Bulyk is using to understand mysterious proteins called transcription factors that are critical in understanding DNA because they turn individual genes on and off.

"I'm interested in understanding how it is that the genome is organized," Bulyk said. "We get such complex life forms and processes and all the instructions are included in the genome somehow."

Bulyk, assistant professor of medicine, of pathology, and of health sciences and technology at Harvard Medical School, has pioneered the use of microarray technology in the analysis of transcription factors. Her advance promises to dramatically cut the time needed to characterize transcription factors and their associated genes from weeks and months to just a day.

Her work, published in December 2004 in the journal Nature Genetics, won her recognition from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review Magazine, which listed her among the top 35 technology innovators under age 35.

"Martha has been a pioneer in assays for DNA-protein interactions and the computational analysis of the resulting large data sets," said Harvard Medical School Genetics Professor George Church.

Scientists have long known that the blueprint of life is contained in DNA - long, double-stranded helical molecules in the nucleus of every cell in our bodies. DNA itself is made up of a series of base pairs, whose order determines everything from eye color and hair color to number of legs and body shape.

The encoded genes are put into action through a process called transcription, where a special enzyme breaks the DNA strands apart, reads the code, and creates an RNA molecule that carries that code elsewhere in the cell to be translated into action. The transcription process itself is regulated by proteins that bind to specific DNA regulatory elements on either side of the gene. It is these proteins, called transcription factors, and their DNA binding sites that have caught Bulyk's eye.

In her work with the microarrays, Bulyk and her lab team first created microarrays by dotting bits of DNA onto glass slides and then exposed the arrays to a possible transcription factor. They knew that a transcription factor would bind to the DNA at specific sites, and so they gently washed the chip to remove protein that wasn't bound. The remaining proteins, which had been tagged with a fluorescent molecule, glowed. To find what they were looking for, all the researchers had to do was look for the glowing dots.

Researchers devise cheaper way to make genes

50443248 — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 12:23:14 -0400

Harvard researchers have devised a way to greatly decrease the cost of making artificial genes in the laboratory, an advance that could increase the ability of geneticists to explore and test new theories about the building blocks of life.

Harvard Genetics Professor George Church said that after years of technological advances, gene synthesis - or making artificial genes - was one of the few things not automated in the laboratory.

Gene synthesis is a critical process that allows researchers to test new theories, for example, by making genes that create specific proteins with novel properties of interest to scientists.

Putting bacteria to work

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:24:01 -0400

A nautical group of bacteria known as Prochlorococcus removes carbon dioxide from air and fixes it into the carbon content of their own tiny bodies. The more carbon dioxide they take from the air, the less is available to capture the heat that is causing the warm-up of our planet. That adds up to a lot of carbon. "Prochlorococcus is a major ocean sink for carbon," says George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member of the Harvard-M.I.T. Division of Health Sciences and Technology. "It is responsible for 40 percent of the photosynthesis (carbon dioxide removal) on Earth." A quart of ocean water often contains 100 million Prochlorococcus cells. Its population in the global ocean could be as high as 10 trillion trillion.

Technique enables quick accounting of gene function

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:17:00 -0400

Now that whole genomes have been sequenced, a group of scientists has geared up for the next phase: identification and classification of newly discovered coding regions. The DNA microchip, developed just a few years ago, has already become a standard tool in the geneticist's repertoire. With genomic sequence in hand, the researcher can synthesize all the genes in an organism -- or even just fragments of them -- and then dot them in a regular pattern on a glass slide. But for many organisms, up to 40 percent of the DNA sequences on the chip have no known function. The challenge is to design probes that make a particular spot stand out. It is a daunting task.

In human genome race, competition spurred better science

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:11:49 -0400

The conflicts between the two teams — one publicly funded, one private — that raced to sequence the human genome often drew more attention than the actual completion of the project itself. A team of Harvard researchers found that the rivalry spurred and improved a potentially sluggish public project. And an important consequence of the dual efforts is the existence of separate sequences and their implications for the scientific community. George Church, John Aach, Jay Shendure, and colleagues performed one of the first comparisons of the two draft sequences, detailed in Nature. The rivalry helped, they found. "The managers in the public domain are highly motivated to undermine the utility and cost-effectiveness of any private resource," said Church.