Rob Phillips

Fred and Nancy Morris Professor of Biophysics and Biology ; California Institute of Technology ; Pasadena

Steps Towards Writing the Genomic Novel (Monday April 27th, 14h-15h)

We live in the genomic era.  Though some might say that we “cracked” the genetic code in the 1960s, the ability

to read genomes at will is really quite limited.  Specifically, although we know much about deciphering protein coding regions in genomes, in prokaryotes and eukaryotes alike, it remains impressively difficult to figure out how genes are regulated and how to tune that regulation to our own ends.  Even in the most well understood of organisms such as the bacterium E. coli, for half the genes we still know next to nothing about how they are regulated.   The big question that will be explored in my talk is how might we go about deciphering the modern Rosetta Stone of genomes and given our understanding of that rich biological language, can we rewrite these genomes to create previously unimagined behaviors and organisms?