Summary
The avalanche of easy-to-create genomics data has impacted almost all areas of medicine and science, from cancer patients and microbial diagnostics to molecular monitoring for astronauts in space. Recent technologies and algorithms from our laboratory and others can now show single-cell and clonal resolution of phenotypes as they evolve and resist therapies, which manifest at the genome, epigenome, transcriptome, and epitranscriptome levels. To contextualize these molecular dynamics, we are piloting new methods across the central dogma (DNA, RNA, protein), including an integrative, cross-kingdom view of patients (precision metagenomics) and global citizen science projects that leverage longitudinal metagenome and microbiome profiles of the world’s urban systems (MetaSUB.org) to map global dynamics of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) markers. All of these methods and molecular tools work together to guide the most comprehensive, longitudinal, multi-omic view of human astronaut physiology in the NASA Twins Study and the NASA Biomolecule Sequencer Mission, creating new technologies that can sequence, quantify, and engineer nucleic acids and entire genomes for long-term human space travel. In this webinar we highlight methods from Promega that are used for these endeavors.
Speaker
Christopher Mason, PhD
Associate Professor of Computational Genomics
Weill Cornell Medical College, NY
Dr. Christopher Mason completed his dual B.S. in Genetics and Biochemistry from University of Wisconsin-Madison, his Ph.D. in Genetics from Yale University, and his post-doctoral training in Clinical Genetics at Yale Medical School, while also serving as the first Visiting Fellow of Genomics, Ethics, and Law at Yale Law School. He is currently an Associate Professor of Computational Genomics at Weill Cornell Medicine, with appointments in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, the Institute for Computational Biomedicine, the Tri-Institutional Program on Computational Biology and Medicine, the Meyer Cancer Center, and the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute, and is Director of the World Quant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction. He has won the NIH’s Transformative R01 Award, the Vallee Scholar Award, the CDC Honor Award for Clinical Testing, and the World Quant Scholar Award. The Mason laboratory develops and deploys new biochemical and computational methods in functional genomics, with a focus on multi-omic, longitudinal profiling, for both patients on Earth and NASA astronauts in space.