Tag Archive | genomics
Sequencing the Genome of the Ocean’s Weirdest Creatures
Cephalopods—ocean-dwelling mollusks such as the octopus, squid, cuttlefish, and Nautilus—are ancient and complex creatures. They evoke our primal fascination with mysterious creatures of the sea, with weird and wonderful features like prehensile arms that can regenerate when amputated, huge, vertebrate-like eyes, jet-propulsion systems to help swim by squirting water, and special organs to change skin […]
LabBook November 2, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. THIS […]
Research at the Petascale: The Challenge of Processing One Million Genomes
Most computer users are familiar with a handful of data storage measurements: kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes. If you have a big digital music or movie collection, you might even have a hard drive measuring in the terabytes. But what about a petabyte? Even if you know the basic formula for calculating storage sizes (a petabyte is […]
Plenty Left to Learn from One Isolated Population
The Hutterites are an isolated, religious “founder population,” similar to the Amish or Mennonites, descended from a group of about 1,200 settlers that migrated to North America from Europe in the late 19th century. They settled in South Dakota, and then spread to Montana and western Canada, forming several self-sufficient, communal agricultural colonies. Today’s Hutterites […]
LabBook August 24, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. This […]
LabBook August 17, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. THIS […]
Summer in the Research Lab
For many college students, summer means heading back home to Mom and Dad’s house, hanging around and wishing you were back at school with your friends. Maybe you take a class or two, or work some menial job to make spending money for the fall (I spent the summer after my freshman year washing cars […]
From Beehives to Prostate Cancer Treatment
by Rob Mitchum A common feature of pharmacies and organic grocery stores is the aisle of natural remedies, featuring bottle upon bottle of herbs, extracts, and oils that promise a wide range of medical benefits. For legal reasons, the health claims made by these products are often fuzzy, boasting of vague antioxidant or anti-inflammatory activity. […]
A Christmas Present for Geneticists
On Christmas morning this year, most people hoped to find an iPad, a puppy, or a luxury car wrapped in a giant red bow under their tree. But geneticists received their present a day early, in the form of two landmark papers published on Christmas Eve in the journal Science. The two extremely dense data […]
Stepping in a Pile of…New Genomic Data
Genomic sequencing has made incredible strides in recent years, with both the cost and the time required to sequence an individual’s entire DNA sequence dropping meteorically. Yet one rate-limiting step for securing an organism’s genome remains: in order to sequence a species’ genetic information, you need a sample to start with. In humans or laboratory […]
