Event Description
Andrew Cohen and the Drexel BioImage Lab are pleased to welcome Dr. Rafael Carazo Salas from the University of Cambridge to present a seminar titled "Wiring the genomic circuits that control cells by microscopy based pheno-genomics & big data".
Abstract
Understanding how complex phenotypic traits arise from the genome is both the promise and challenge of modern biology. It has the potential to identify the origin of many diseases and inspire personalized medicine strategies to combat them. A necessary step towards that understanding is being able to extract and integrate detailed phenotypic information at the cellular level, such that it can be interpreted unequivocally and quantitatively with respect to genotypic information.
Automated high-throughput microscopy-based technologies provide an increasingly important tool to understand how genotype engenders phenotype. In the past few years my group has pioneered the development of high-throughput/high-content microscopy, multi-process phenotyping pipelines for functional genomics, using yeast as experimental model. Using this strategy, we have been able to systematically discover hundreds of new genes & obtain the most integrated view of how some cell biological processes interact and are linked, in particular cell polarity, the cell cycle, cell shape and the microtubule cytoskeleton (Graml V et al, Dev Cell 2014; http://www.sysgro.org; Jeffares D et al, Nat Genet 2015; Geymonat M et al., in revision, Dev Cell; Dodgson J et al, in revision, Mol Syst Biol).
As part of that we have begun the development of visual analytics tools to make the Big Data generated from microscopy-based cellular phenotyping projects accessible and further mineable by the community, to potentiate the return-on-investment of those large and expensive projects (Antal B et al, Genome Biol 2015; http://www.mineotaur.org). Furthermore, in collaboration with Jason Swedlow (OME/Dundee) and Alvis Brazma (EBI/ELIXIR), and led by Jason Swedlow, we are also helping build since January 2015 the Image Data Repository, the first community-wide repository for image data for life sciences research.
In this talk I will present selected results from a few of the projects mentioned above. I will also describe how we have begun porting our mindset and know-how to human stem cells as experimental paradigm, to investigate how pluripotency and differentiation decisions are made at the cell biological level and single-cell level.
Biography
Rafael Carazo Salas is a group leader at the Department of Pharmacology in the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Originally from Costa Rica, he trained as a physicist before receiving a PhD in Cell Biology & Biophysics from EMBL Heidelberg (Germany) and Université Paris 7 (France), in 2001. He then worked as postdoctoral fellow at Cancer Research UK in London and subsequently as research associate at the Rockefeller University in New York City, from 2002 to 2007. In 2008, he started his group in ETH Zurich in Switzerland, and moved to Cambridge UK in 2010, where he is based.
Rafael's interdisciplinary group works at the frontier of cell biology and functional genomics. His lab's goal is to elucidate how the gene and protein networks that control basic or disease-related processes like cellular growth, division and differentiation operate in space and in time within cells, and how those networks allow cells to function as integrated systems and acquire different fates. To that end, he and his group develop and use a range of interdisciplinary quantitative cell biology methods, including 3D high-throughput/high-content microscopy pipelines and Big Data approaches. |
