Part II of The New Biology documentary. This documentary film features the wave of cutting-edge technologies that now provide the opportunity to create predictive models of living systems, and gain wisdom about the fundamental nature of life itself. The potential impact for humanity is immense: from fighting complex diseases such as cancer, enabling proactive surveillance of virulent pathogens, and increasing food crop production.
Part III of The New Biology documentary. This documentary film features the wave of cutting-edge technologies that now provide the opportunity to create predictive models of living systems, and gain wisdom about the fundamental nature of life itself. The potential impact for humanity is immense: from fighting complex diseases such as cancer, enabling proactive surveillance of virulent pathogens, and increasing food crop production.
Part IV of The New Biology documentary. This documentary film features the wave of cutting-edge technologies that now provide the opportunity to create predictive models of living systems, and gain wisdom about the fundamental nature of life itself. The potential impact for humanity is immense: from fighting complex diseases such as cancer, enabling proactive surveillance of virulent pathogens, and increasing food crop production.
This documentary film features the wave of cutting-edge technologies that now provide the opportunity to create predictive models of living systems, and gain wisdom about the fundamental nature of life itself. The potential impact for humanity is immense: from fighting complex diseases such as cancer, enabling proactive surveillance of virulent pathogens, and increasing food crop production.
Part I of The New Biology documentary. This documentary film features the wave of cutting-edge technologies that now provide the opportunity to create predictive models of living systems, and gain wisdom about the fundamental nature of life itself. The potential impact for humanity is immense: from fighting complex diseases such as cancer, enabling proactive surveillance of virulent pathogens, and increasing food crop production.
In this presentation, Greg Harhay from the USDA offers data on pathogens involved in bovine respiratory disease complex, known as “shipping fever.” His team used PacBio sequencing to analyze several isolates from two different pathogens, looking at their DNA sequence and methylation patterns.
In this AGBT plenary talk, Jonas Korlach presented a number of collaborative studies between PacBio and other institutions to make use of highly accurate, long-read sequence data, which has led to a revival of finished genomes. Examples from the infectious disease or pathogen realm included Pertussis, Salmonella, and Listeria, all of which now have closed genomes from PacBio-generated data. Korlach also reported on epigenomic information in Salmonella and Listeria, indicating potential new forms of DNA modifications.
Jonas Korlach, CSO of PacBio, discusses the revival of finished genomes the microbial community will see with long read data, emphasizing that for certain organisms such as rapidly evolving microbes, having a de novo finished genome will be more useful than creating a draft based on a previous related reference genome. Korlach describes two bioinformatic methods from PacBio, a hierarchical genome assembly process (HGAP) and an consensus caller (Quiver), which are used to generate finished genomes from just long-read PacBio data, with final genome sequence accuracies over 99.999%. Korlach demonstrates the ability of PacBio data to generate closed, high-quality de…
Bart Weimer, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who is leading the 100K Foodborne Pathogen Genome Project, talks about using PacBio sequencing to produce long reads for microbial genomes as well as to study how bacteria use epigenetics to regulate gene expression.
UC Davis’s Bart Weimer describes foodborne pathogens and their proclivity for rapid genome rearrangement. The 100K Pathogen Genome Project he leads is using PacBio long-read sequencing to close genomes and analyze methylation; Weimer reports that his team has already discovered new epigenetic modifications in Salmonella and Listeria with the technology.
Epigenetics expert Michael Jennings from Griffith University first posited the phasevarion, or the phase variable regulon mechanism in host-adapted pathogens. This mechanism switches expression of multiple genes in a coordinated fashion and has significant implications on pathogen virulence. In his talk, Jennings describes the phasevarion and his use of whole methylome data to rapidly identify methylation targets.
Ulf Gyllensten from Uppsala University used SMRT Sequencing to study multi-drug-resistant bacteria. Time to results was faster than other NGS platforms and generally resulted in complete genome assemblies, even for an organism with a 70% AT-rich genome. He also applied SMRT Sequencing for the characterization of HPV subtypes, important in cervical cancer.
In his AGBT talk, Matthew Blow from the Joint Genome Institute describes high-throughput pipelines to annotate gene function and explore methylation in microbes. He uses transposon sequencing to annotate thousands of genes in bacteria and archaea. Later, he presents a study using SMRT Sequencing to generate complete methylomes for 232 prokaryotes, showing that orphan methylases appear to have a regulatory role.
In this AGBT 2017 poster, the University of Helsinki’s Petri Auevinen reports on efforts to understand bacteria that grow on, and subsequently spoil, food. This analysis monitored DNA modifications and transcriptomic changes in three species of lactic acid bacteria. Scientists discovered that the organisms’ metabolic profiles change substantially when grown together compared to those cultured individually, and are now studying how Cas protein activity changes under these conditions too.
One of the longstanding challenges in infectious disease has been the lack of high-quality reference genomes. However, developments in genome sequencing are helping researchers overcome this barrier. Recently, highly contiguous genome assemblies of Plasmodium falciparum, Aedes aegypti, and multiple trypanosomes have become available. The number of reference genomes for bacteria that cause infectious disease is similarly expanding rapidly. In this webinar Meredith Ashby discusses how these new resources are already yielding new biological insights into critical questions in infectious disease research, including how parasites evade the immune system add how pathogens are adapting to evolutionary pressures.