Home>News & Publications:Blog

Blog

  • Behind the scenes of The Cancer Genome Atlas: part 2

    Leah Eisenstadt, August 11th, 2011 | Filed under

    Yesterday on the blog, we introduced you to some of the Broad researchers who built tools, teams, and resources to generate and analyze a massive flood of data and analytical code for The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Today we give you a look at the system they built to manage data analysis for the project: Firehose.

    0 Comments
    Read More

  • Behind the scenes of The Cancer Genome Atlas: part 1

    Leah Eisenstadt, August 10th, 2011 | Filed under

    In this two-part series, we’ll give you a look at some of the tools, teams, and resources built by Broad Institute scientists to support the large-scale cancer sequencing project known as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).

    0 Comments
    Read More

  • Highlights from the 2010 Annual Report: Aviv Regev focuses on how cells are “wired”

    Leah Eisenstadt, August 3rd, 2011 | Filed under

    Cells use a complex network of connections to make a constant array of decisions about their surrounding environment: Is it time to grow? Is it time to change into a different type of cell? When a cellular component or connection is missing or defective, disease takes hold.

    1 Comments
    Read More

  • Biology visualization workshop videos now online

    Leah Eisenstadt, July 29th, 2011 | Filed under

    This spring, artists, designers, computational biologists, and software engineers gathered in the Broad Institute auditorium for three days of talks, posters, and tutorials on the cutting-edge field of visualization in biology.

    0 Comments
    Read More

  • Getting the cover story

    Leah Eisenstadt, July 19th, 2011 | Filed under

    Back in May, we told you on the blog about Trinity, a suite of tools that assembles transcripts, or bits of RNA that have been copied from a cell’s genome, into a “transcriptome,” even without a reference genome handy.

    0 Comments
    Read More

  • Word of the day: Biomarkers

    Leah Eisenstadt, July 7th, 2011 | Filed under

    Last week on the Broad website, we told you about a new approach to detect and verify biomarkers, using the search for signals of heart attack as a test case. In this study, the team of scientists from the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital looked for proteins in the blood that are released when heart cells are injured and that can be detected quickly after the attack.

    0 Comments
    Read More

  • Psychiatric research accelerates at the Broad

    Leah Eisenstadt, May 18th, 2011 | Filed under

    After a storied career running a multimillion-dollar business, Ted Stanley and his wife, Vada, set up a philanthropic foundation in the 1980s to invest in good causes. Their goals became a lot more focused when their son developed bipolar disorder and needed treatment. The Stanleys considered themselves fortunate that the drug lithium successfully treated his symptoms – and they want to make sure that someday, there is a much wider range of options for others with psychiatric illness.

    0 Comments
    Read More

  • GenePattern: Data choreographer

    Leah Eisenstadt, May 11th, 2011 | Filed under

    Six years ago, a team of researchers at the Broad faced a challenge: researchers the world over were using microarrays – chips covered with microscopic fragments of DNA – to measure the expression, or activity, of genes, but the tools to analyze the data from these large-scale studies were often out of the direct reach of biomedical researchers.

    0 Comments
    Read More

  • How tweet it is

    Leah Eisenstadt, April 28th, 2011 | Filed under

    With nearly 125 posts to date on the Broad blog, we are now venturing out into another realm of social media: Twitter. On the Broad’s new Twitter page, you can follow news updates, press releases, blog posts, and other announcements all in one place.

    0 Comments
    Read More

  • Broad researchers bring rare variants to light with new technique

    Leah Eisenstadt, March 9th, 2011 | Filed under

    Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been successful at discovering common genetic variants that are risk factors for disease or that influence traits. Although more than 1,000 genetic loci, or regions of the genome, have been associated with diseases or traits through GWAS, much of the heritability remains hidden. A disease or trait’s heritability is the degree to which it is inherited, and therefore, influenced by genetic elements; scientists often determine heritability through studies of siblings and twins to tease out genetic and environmental effects.

    0 Comments
    Read More