Blogs

This week, an interview with David Altshuler – clinical endocrinologist, human geneticist, and core faculty member of the Broad Institute – appears in Science Translational Medicine. David spoke with Sarah Henrickson, an early-career clinician-investigator who completed an M.D.-Ph.D. program at Harvard Medical School, and is currently a pediatrics resident in the Boston Combined Residency Program at Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center.

This week, a team of researchers from the Broad Institute and Weill Cornell Medical College reported the discovery of mutations in a gene previously unknown to be associated with prostate cancer, a disease that strikes over 241,000 men each year in the United States.

Last week on the Broad website, we featured recent work by Broad researchers that can shed new light on the massive genomic changes taking place in cancer cells. The genomes in tumors are often drastically disorganized, with large chunks of missing or extra DNA — even whole chromosomes — in addition to smaller, single-letter mutations. These alterations can complicate the search for genetic changes underlying cancer.

The Broad Institute is launching a new series of workshops to share laboratory and computational methods developed within our community and extend the impact of our science. These BroadE workshops, which launch May 21, are open to all Broad staff and to scientists from the Harvard and MIT communities. 

Last week we wrote about the new WormToolbox automated imaging software, used to capture single images of the C. elegans roundworm. See the news story here.

While it’s one thing to describe the technology, we thought we’d share several images from real Broad Institute experiments using the WormToolbox program.

Even when everything is in working order, the team in the Broad’s Genome Sequencing Platform is never completely satisfied. Someone is always tinkering, inventing, or thinking about a way to strengthen one of the links in the chain of events that leads to sequenced DNA.

Look around the Broad's public spaces, and you'll find that the Broad is “Unfolding.” That’s the title of an exhibition featuring the work that artist-in-residence Guhapriya Ranganathan has created during her two-year collaboration with scientists here. Tonight, Ranganathan, known as Gupi, will give a talk at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston about that collaboration.

If there were just one book of biology, it would be rewritten constantly with the sometimes dramatic, more often incremental advances in understanding that come with the nature of science. Constant revision can come with insight – think Darwin – or with technology – witness faster, cheaper sequencing machines – or with both.

Over the past five years, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified about 2,000 common genetic variations that underlie human disease risk. Earlier this week, we told you about a model Broad researchers and collaborators developed to help explain how thousands of other common genetic variations with low effect size combine to contribute to disease risk in rheumatoid arthritis and three other common diseases with a known genetic link.

Picture a game of chess between the immune system and HIV. For every move the immune system makes against the virus, its opponent adapts, changing the game and shifting the advantage. But what if you could turn the clock back and watch the first few moves of the game? What could you learn about the virus from its opening moves?

Researchers from the Broad Institute and the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Harvard set out to take a careful look at a viral population during the critical time period just after infection.