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Petit Institute Breakfast Club Seminar Series

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    Towards an Evolutionary Synthetic Biology
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-11-10) Gaucher, Eric A.
    Evolution is the unifying theory behind biology, and has entered the mainstream of computational and molecular biology as a result of genomics. Nevertheless, evolutionary ideas today only barely influence the practice of molecular sciences. Innovation in many areas will be required before evolutionary analyses provide utility to biomedicine and biotechnology. Research in our laboratory attempts to enhance our understanding of evolutionary processes and structure-function relationships in the long-term, while also generating novel biomolecules having technological and therapeutic value in the short-term. If successful, these innovations will add utility to genome sequence data far beyond that found in comparative genomics. Using information extracted from molecular evolutionary analyses to guide the engineering of proteins is an innovative addition to existing methods. If evolution-guided engineering can deliver biomolecular properties not otherwise attainable with traditional engineering/directed evolution techniques, then this approach will have wide utility. The above activities form the foundation of our attempt to develop an evolutionary synthetic biology. We are energized by the prospect of joining evolutionary biology and synthetic biology. Synthetic biology appears to mean different things to different scientific disciplines. Surprisingly, however, biologists seem to have taken a backseat to chemists and engineers in the development of this field. It seems apparent that synthetic biology would stand to benefit if molecular evolution contributed to its progress.
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    Engineering Stem Cell Technologies
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-04-21) McDevitt, Todd C.
    The McDevitt laboratory is focused on the engineering of innovative technologies to translate the regenerative potential of stem cells into effective cellular and molecular therapies for the treatment of degenerative diseases and traumatic injuries. By developing controlled systems approaches to engineer the microenvironment of stem cells, we aspire to improve the efficiency and yield of directed stem cell differentiation strategies. We also seek to develop novel regenerative molecular therapies based on the morphogens produced by stem cells. Efficient scalable bioprocesses will require the development of enabling tools and technologies to facilitate the production of stem cell technologies. The combination of directed stem cell differentiation and derivation of stem cell biotherapeutics will yield fresh insights into stem cell biology and facilitate new regenerative therapies.
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    Evolutionary Role of DNA Methylation in Animal Genomes
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-10-21) Yi, Soojin V.
    DNA methylation is a primary epigenetic mechanism involved in several regulatory and developmental processes. In this talk, I will focus on the molecular evolutionary role of DNA methylation. An important property of DNA methylation is its propensity to increase specific types of point mutations. Using this property, we have developed analytical tools to investigate influence of DNA methylation on genome evolution. We show that (i) DNA methylation causes different genomic regions to follow qualitatively different molecular clocks, (ii) influence regional variability of nucleotide composition, (iii) affected evolution of vertebrate promoters. Finally, (iv) our survey shows that the influence of DNA methylation on genome evolution is widespread in animal taxa. While the model invertebrate species Drosophila melanogaster and Caenorhabditis elegans lack DNA methylation, the genome of a social bee Apis mellifera exhibits an unmistakable signature of DNA methylation at sequence and functional level.