2022 Kauzmann Lecture – Shankar Balasubramanian
Chemical Approaches For Decoding Genome Function
Thu, Sep. 15, 2022, 4:30pm
Taylor Auditorium, Frick Chemistry Lab B02
Host: Ralph Kleiner
Speaker Details:
Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry
Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
2022 Kauzmann Lecture
One copy of the human genome comprises a primary code made up of an arrangement of just over three billion units of the DNA (or “letters”) G, C, A, and T. While the Human Genome Project took years, thousands of instruments, and several hundred million dollars to decode the first human genome, this can now be done on a single instrument in one day for a thousand dollars. In this lecture I will discuss DNA sequencing and in particular a method for rapidly decoding the genomes that originated in Cambridge in the 1990s. There are other dimensions of chemical features that constitute additional coding mechanisms in DNA, and I will also discuss chemistries for decoding additional chemical and structural features of the genome. I will consider the impact of rapid genome sequencing on the life sciences, medicine, and society.