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Today it’s easy to take for granted that geneticists can identify a mutation, find its gene, and map it to the expressed protein. But just a few decades ago, this problem remained a thorny one. Welcome Bender of Harvard Medical School—with his work teasing out the function of the bithorax complex in Drosophila—made key advances…

Julie Ahringer has focused her career on understanding development and transcriptional regulation in Caenorhabditis elegans. Along the way her lab has built invaluable tools, including a genome-wide RNAi library, that have supported a huge range of discoveries across biology. In recognition of this work, Ahringer has been awarded the 2020 George W. Beadle Award from…

Fifteen years ago, Seth Bordenstein and a small group of colleagues started planning a series of lab experiences that would bring cutting edge genetics methods into biology classrooms. Because they worked on Wolbachia microbes that live in half of the world’s arthropod species, they centered the work on these bacterial parasites and started locally with…

GSA’s Executive Director explains why and how we’re taking TAGC 2020 virtual.   For several years, we at GSA have been planning The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC), originally set for DC in late April 2020. After a successful inaugural meeting in 2016, organizers and GSA staff sought to bring communities together by focusing on scientific…

Last week, the GSA Board of Directors cancelled The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC), an event we had all been eagerly anticipating. It was a heartbreaking end to four years of work and planning by many people across our community.  Although painful, the decision was clearly the socially responsible thing to do. The Board voted unanimously…

When Bonnie Bassler was wrapping up her biochemistry PhD at Johns Hopkins University, she heard a research talk at a small conference in Baltimore that switched on a light and changed her career. A geneticist described how groups of bioluminescent marine Vibrio bacteria could start glowing simultaneously. “I’m sitting there thinking ‘Holy Smokes, how is…

For more than 50 years, Gerald Fink of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and David Botstein of Calico Life Sciences have made unique, and sometimes intersecting, contributions to genetics. Together they taught an advanced genetics course at MIT for more than a decade; they’ve co-authored a series of perspective papers and patents. Each has mentored dozens…

Increasing support for parents in science means making conferences more child-friendly. Guest post by Elisabeth Marnik and Julie Claycomb, members of the GSA Conference Childcare Committee. The scientific community works on the cutting edge. We implement new techniques and methods as soon as we can with the understanding that—though there may be challenges along the…

Get to know the TAGC 2020 Keynote Speakers through our interview series. Caroline Dean has been a project leader at the John Innes Centre Norwich since 1988. Her work on seasonal timing mechanisms in plants has led into a detailed mechanistic analysis of the regulation of the floral repressor FLC in Arabidopsis. FLC transcription is…

Mary Ellen Lane started down the traditional academic career path to faculty but changed directions to find her niche in academic administration—discovering a passion for leadership and enterprise thinking. After transitioning from an Assistant Professor position into administration, she’s served critical roles and moved through the ranks to become Dean at the Graduate School of…

Guest authors C. Brandon Ogbunugafor and Rafael F. Guerrero demystify higher order epistasis through a short story about the perfect brew. Epistasis is the flavor of the month Epistasis is one of the most popular and provocative topics in modern genetics. It has many different definitions, but one especially useful one is that epistasis is…