Community Voices

#TAGC16 Shorts are brief summaries of presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference, a combined meeting of seven genetics research communities held July 13-17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. Elbows, knuckles, and the other synovial joints in your body are mobile marvels of evolution. These joints allow a huge range of possible movements thanks to the presence of…

New Faculty Profiles showcase GSA members who are establishing their first independent labs. If you’d like to be considered for a profile, please complete this form on the GSA website. Steven Zuryn Group Leader, Stafford Fox Senior Research Fellow Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, Australiae Lab website Research program: One of our main…

One of Shakespeare’s First Folios was recently on loan from the Folger Library to Seattle, and my wife and I went to view it. You don’t have to be a theatre-lover to feel awestruck peering at the page opened at: “To be or not to be…” in a printing from Shakespeare’s troupe made shortly after…

Sometimes, the most useful scientific tool is a unique perspective. Leonid Kruglyak is a remarkable example of that fact. He originally trained as a physicist, and his quantitative background was foundational to his successful career in genetics and genomics. Kruglyak’s work focuses on the transmission of complex traits and the genetic basis of phenotypic variation. He…

New Faculty Profiles showcase GSA members who are establishing their first independent labs. If you’d like to be considered for a profile, please complete this form on the GSA website. Michael Wangler Assistant Professor (starting July 2016) Department of Molecular and Human Genetics Baylor College of Medicine Lab website Research program: The overall long-term goal…

My apologies for this blog post to Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, who collaborated with Sir Arthur Sullivan on a series of comic operas that included The Pirates of Penzance. Pirates premiered in 1879 and featured a song called “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” and I am far from the first to…

“This is the first self-replicating species that we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer. Because it’s very difficult to eliminate multiple genes from a cell . . . we decided early on that we had to take a synthetic route—even though nobody had been there before—to see if we could synthesize the…

Model Organism Databases (MODs) and the Gene Ontology Consortium play a crucial “behind-the-scenes” role in the work of model organism geneticists and many other biomedical researchers. This guest post by the newly-formed Alliance of Genome Resources announces the group’s intention to integrate the efforts of the MODs and other genome resources. You can learn more…

Phil Hieter, former GSA President and a Co-Chair for The Allied Genetics Conference, works at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, where Dave Ng directs the Michael Smith Laboratories Teaching Facility, AMBL. Dave developed a popular card game, Phylo, as a method to teach people about biodiversity, and Phil had an idea—what…

New Faculty Profiles showcase GSA members who are establishing their first independent labs. If you’d like to be considered for a profile, please complete this form on the GSA website. Divya Sitaraman Assistant Professor (since 2014) Department of Psychological Sciences University of San Diego Lab website Research program: My long-term goal is to understand behavioral outputs…

Dr. Cori Bargmann studies how an animal’s genes, environment and experience cooperate to influence different behaviors. Bargmann, Torsten N. Wiesel Professor and the head of the Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at The Rockefeller University, served as co-chair of the NIH Advisory Committee for the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative…