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NYC's Mayor Bloomberg Visits the New Home of the New York Genome Center
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg stopped by the new site of the New York Genome Center at 101 Sixth Avenue in Manhattan on Tuesday. While the center did lose out on the $100 million genius school grant last year, Bloomberg dug into his own deep coffers and offered up $2.5 million to help establish the new site.
A Tour of IMGM's Sequencing Lab
In this video, Julia Karow, editor of In Sequence and Clinical Sequencing News, visits IMGM Laboratories in Martinsried, Germany. Ralph Oehlmann, director of business development at IMGM, gives a tour of their sequencing lab and discusses their development of metagenomic services.
A Conversation with Geisinger Health System's David Ledbetter at ACMG
BioArray News editor Justin Petrone caught up with David Ledbetter, CSO of Geisinger Health System, at the recent Annual Clinical Genetics Meeting held in Charlotte, NC, to discuss the future of CMA as a first-tier test, classifying findings of uncertain significance, and more.
Investigator
National Cancer Institute
Now an investigator at NCI, Ludmila Prokunina-Olsson describes her focus as trying to put findings from genome-wide association studies in a biological context so that they can be applied in a clinical setting. "We work downstream from GWAS," she says. "The primary goal of my research is to identify the functional links between these genetic associations and molecular phenotypes, especially those that can be directly translated in new clinical tools." Because GWAS have produced so much data, Prokunina-Olsson says her chief challenge is deciding what is important and setting priorities. "We can't possibly follow up on all of these interesting findings," she says. "I wish we could have more people doing this work, more hands, more approaches. There is so much information out there that we have to sort through the data to find the gold."
DNA sequencing to pinpoint the cause of rare genetic disorders is becoming common, the New York Times reports.
Advisers suggest that the National Institutes of Health consider a grant application process in which all submissions are considered to be new.
Companies may be able to access medical and genetic data, and possibly personal data, housed by the UK's National Health Service.
Caltech's Jean-Lou Chameau is to lead Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.
Whole genome sequencing versus traditional genotyping for investigation of a Mycobacterium tuberculosis outbreak: A longitudinal molecular epidemiological study
Roetzer, Diel. et al. PLOS Medicine
Whole-genome sequencing provides refined resolution for tuberculosis tracking compared with conventional methods based on strain typing, according to this PLOS Medicine study. Researchers from Germany and France did whole-genome sequencing on 86 Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from a German TB outbreak, which occurred in the midst of a prospective epidemiological survey spanning more than a decade. With the genome sequence data, they tracked down 85 SNPs that proved useful for finding clusters of isolates and following the course of the outbreak, which started with the emergence a so-called Hamburg clone in the early- to mid-1990s, followed by its expansion in 1998, and subsequently spread to a nearby state called Schleswig-Holstein. "Based on the genome variation discovered, emergence of the Hamburg clone was dated back to a period between 1993 and 1997," authors of the study conclude, "shortly before the discovery of the outbreak through epidemiological surveillance."
Breakpoint profiling of 64 cancer genomes reveals numerous complex rearrangements spawned by homology-independent mechanisms
Malhotra, Lindberg, et al. Genome Research
Complex breakpoints are common in cancer genomes, according to a study by researchers at the University of Virginia and elsewhere. Using a paired-end mapping algorithm called HYDRA-MULTI, the team tallied up breakpoints in 64 cancer samples using matched tumor and normal sequence data generated for The Cancer Genome Atlas. From mapping patterns for nearly 6,200 somatic structural variant breakpoints, the investigators determined that three-quarters of the tumor genomes housed one or more complex clusters of breakpoints. Their subsequent analyses suggest that many of the complex rearrangements found in the cancer genomes appeared through lone mutational events — apparently involving a combination of double-strand breaks and non-homologous repair.
Nanosphere said this week in its financial report that it has promoted Michael McGarrity to succeed William Moffitt as its new president and CEO. The company also said it has appointed Sheli Rosenberg, Michael Ward, and McGarrity to serve on its board of directors, while Moffitt, William White, Mark Slezak, and Roy Davis have all resigned from the board. Rosenberg, who served on Nanosphere's board from 2002 to 2012, will be the new chair of the board. McGarrity previously was VP of sales and marketing and chief commercial officer, and he has 24 years of experience in the medical devices industry, including 13 years at Stryker.
National Science Foundation Director Subra Suresh plans to leave his post at the end of March to accept an appointment as president of Carnegie Mellon University, NSF said this week. Suresh was nominated to run the agency in 2010, and previously he was dean of the School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been on leave as an engineering professor at MIT while he has been directing NSF.