I teach at Brandeis (as most of you know) and have been happy to see three of my former students end up at the Broad Institute as analysts/programmers, doing what they always hoped to do. Someday with their permission I’ll tell you about them. Most of them are over 40, had years of experience in programming, but love bioinformatics and modern biology, and moved into the field to do what they love.
So, it was a pleasant surprise for me today to run into one of my former students at the Harvard Medical School lunchtime Systems Biology Theory Lecture, which is a nice tradition of a good lunch, a whiteboard talk (no powerpoint) and always interesting topics. He was there because he was working with the speaker of Friday (today’s) lecture.
The speaker was a mathematical biologist, Caroline Colijn who is studying mycobacterium tuberculosis. She is doing a double duty between the Broad Institute and the Harvard School of Public Health. Her talk was on flux balance analysis of TB, adding in information to the stochiometric matrix using expression data gotten from cultures of TB treated with treatment drugs.
Speaking of Broad, there is a good talk coming up on epigenomics given by Christoph Bock (Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics, Germany) on Wednesday Oct 31 at 10am in room 1001 in the 7CC Broad Institute building. It will be a lecture on EpiGraph (warning: small PDF from ISMB07). I would paste the entire talk abstract here, but it’s pretty long. Suffice today, the main point of the paper is that there is a “statistical epigenome” that needs to be represented, and they’re developing the tool to do it. Will probably prove to be very interesting.