Blog

Broadies are pros at sharing. They share ideas, data, equipment, and even bikes. So it may be no surprise to learn that behind the scenes of the Broad’s fast-paced research computing network for data collection and analysis, servers have been quietly getting in the sharing game, too, going “virtual” to save the Broad money, energy, and space and to keep pace with the growing demand for efficient computing by large and diverse research projects throughout the institute.

Before arriving at a conference in Santa Cruz last year, Broad researcher Federica Di Palma had not realized that the computational tool developed by others at the Broad and relished by her research group had such a following outside of the institute. Federica and her fellow members of the Broad’s Vertebrate Biology Group had been among the first scientists to put the alignment tool – known as Satsuma – to use, but they were certainly not the only ones.

Though it may not seem obvious, fungi are the sister group to animals on the tree of life. Unlike bacteria, which are an entirely different part of the tree of life, fungi are nestled in with eukaryotes close to humans and other animals. Because of that they share a lot of common biological pathways. To treat a fungal infection successfully, without eliciting undue harm to its human host, one needs to find out what makes them different from animals.

If you stand in the lobby of the Broad Institute, it’s hard not to notice the movement of mammals above your head. A 17-foot wide mobile that hangs from the lobby’s ceiling includes the silhouettes of a chimpanzee, two-toed sloth, alpaca, little brown bat, elephant, dolphin, and more. Each of the depicted mammals gently swaying from the mobile’s branches has had its genome sequenced at the Broad Institute, the Genome Institute at Washington University, or the Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center.