Students and faculty gathered in one of the lecture halls in the Gerstenzang Science Library on Tuesday, Jan. 16 for a joint biology/neuroscience colloquium with Dr. Job Dekker titled “Folding, unfolding, and refolding genomes.” Dekker is a professor in the Program of Gene Function and Expression as well as the co-director of the new Program in Systems Biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He performs his research as Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).
During his postdoctoral research, Dekker created chromosome conformation capture (3C) technology that allows for genome-wide analysis, which led to the construction of the first 3D map of the human genome. This was one of the biggest accomplishments in genetics since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. Symposium host Jim Haber referred to Dekker as “unequivocally the father of a field [3C technology].”
The Human Genome Project was one of the first major international projects that focused on learning about the nucleotide base pairs that make up the DNA in humans and mapping out all the possible genes that come from people’s genomes. The project was started in 1990 and was officially completed in April of 2003. Though only about 90 percent of the human genome was sequenced, this project remains the world’s largest collaborative biological project, according to the Human Genome Project’s website.
The origin of 3C technology comes from Dekker’s desire to develop a way to determine the folded structure of a chromosome in high resolution, Dekker said. The technology analyzes the organization of the chromatin that make up the cell. The progression of the 3C technology led to the creation of 4C, 5C and Hi-C, all different variations of the original 3C prototype.
A majority of the talk highlighted the interconnection between 3C technology and contact maps. Contact maps are used to demonstrate the distance between every amino acid residue pairs of 3D protein structures using a 2D matrix. Amino acid residue pairs are types of organic compounds that contain an amine and carboxyl functional group, along with a R group side chain, that is specific to each amino acid.
Next Tuesday, Jan. 23, there will be another joint biology/neuroscience colloquium in the Gerstenzang Science Library, where Dr. Ken Norman will be giving a talk entitled “Tracking brain activity during continuous perception and recall.” The following Tuesday, Jan. 30, the physics department is hosting a colloquium with Dr. Daniel Harlow called “Black holes, holography, and quantum error correction.”