Free Public Lecture Wednesday, July 10 "Human Genome: Now in 3D!"

The Boulder School for Condensed Matter and Materials Physics presents a public lecture:

Human genome: Now in 3D!

Presented by: Leonid Mirny, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Wednesday, July 10

7:00 p.m.

DUAN G1B30

Abstract: Cells of the human body contain long molecules of DNA, 2 meters in each cell. It has been almost 20 years since the human genome was sequenced, but only now we are starting to understand why DNA molecules are folded in space inside a cell and how this is important for processing genetic information. I will present our current understanding of how DNA is folded in healthy cells and misfolded in diseases. I will then talk about recent advances in the field, which demonstrated that tiny molecular motors that do “loop extrusion” organize DNA into chromosomes and then twists them into a Da Vinci Staircase to pass genetic information to next generations. While Biology provides us with enormous amounts of new data, Physics continues to play a crucial role in understanding the principles and mechanisms of DNA folding.

About the Lecturer

Professor Mirny received his PhD in Biophysics from Harvard University in 1998. After a few years as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, he was appointed to the MIT Faculty in 2001, joining the MIT Health Sciences and Technology Division and the Department of Physics. The Mirny lab has been studying biophysical principles of chromosome organization using a combination of Hi-C data analysis and computational polymer modelling. Their work led to discovery of the new mechanisms of chromosome organization by loop extrusion, its experimental validation, as well as development of computational tools for analysis and visualization of Hi-C data (http://higlass.io).

Recent achievements also include characterization of the pathway of mitotic chromosome condensation and single-cell analysis of chromosomes in oocytes. Prof. Mirny is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, an Associate Faculty of the Broad Institute, and an Associate Member of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Sponsored by 2019 Boulder School for Condensed Matter and Materials Physics 

Supported by the National Science Foundation, Materials Theory 

More information about the 2019 Boulder School, visit their Web site.