Join President Ángel Cabrera in conversation with conservationist Enric Sala, current National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and author of The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild, which makes a clear case for why protecting nature is our best health insurance, and why it makes economic sense.
The event includes an opportunity for the audience to ask questions.
Unscripted and informal — unearthing leadership’s thinking behind the big ideas taking shape across the Institute and trends likely to define our future — this video series is meant to capture candid conversations between President Ángel Cabrera and thought leaders across Georgia Tech and beyond.
Discussions will revolve around various topics related to academics and research, as well as campus life and culture.
I'm very much looking forward to exploring the multitude of voices and backgrounds that contribute to making Georgia Tech what it is and shaping the world we live in,” said President Cabrera. “Every day I am inspired by the talent I get to work with, and I’m excited to share it with our entire community.”
JOIN: https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/pryjtgck
About Enric Sala:
Sala, a former university professor who saw himself writing the obituary of ocean life, quit academia to become a full-time conservationist. He founded and leads Pristine Seas, a project that combines exploration, research, and media to support and empower local communities and inspire country leaders to protect the last wild places in the ocean. Pristine Seas has helped to create 22 of the largest marine reserves on the planet, covering an area of 5.8 million square kilometers.
Event Details
Luca Pagani, Ph.D.
Department of Biology
University of Padova
ABSTRACT
A growing body of human ancient DNA evidence is being used to build increasingly more realistic models of demographic changes in the last few thousand years. However, due to low coverage and low sample size, in most cases ancient DNA is inherently limited in providing phased haplotypes and accurate population-level allele frequency estimates.
Here we propose to consider modern genomes as being arranged together from pieces of a jigsaw of ancient haplotypes that recombined and admixed in the last few thousand years. Following what has already been attempted for recently admixed populations, one can use local ancestry methods to extract these genomic regions and study them separately. The benefit of this approach stems from our ability to make use of existing high-quality whole genomes, which can be deconvoluted to identify the genetic makeup of the ancient populations that admixed to form contemporary human groups.
Host: Joe Lachance, Ph.D.
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Without leaving the comfort of your home, on October 22 you can enjoy an evening under the stars, guided by the Georgia Tech Observatory. This is the Observatory's third online public night, preceded by many years of in-person public nights on the roof of Howey Physics Building. Tune in here at 8 PM ET to watch the live stream.
Viewers will be treated to a live tour of the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars by Observatory Director James Sowell, as shown through the lense of a Georgia Tech telescope to a live stream on YouTube. The stream is dependent on clear weather to happen.
Read more about the Observatory's inaugural online public night, which took place on May 7, and save the YouTube channel to your calendar for the October 22 online public night.
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Join us for an interactive session where we will explore ways in which racial microaggressions manifest themselves in science. We will discuss what microaggressions are and how they effect underrepresented individuals in an academic setting. We will present several examples of microaggressions and discuss general strategies for confronting them. Participants will brainstorm ideas for ways in which they would approach different microaggression scenarios followed by group discussion.
An initiative sponsored by the Society for the Advancement in Biology Education Research (SABER) focused on promoting awareness, understanding and commitment to change academic biology environments to be more inclusive and strive for racial justice in STEM education. We are excited that speakers will be compensated for their time and this event is co-sponsored by Arizona State University’s HHMI Inclusive Excellence Project, SEISMIC Collaboration, and University of California Santa Barbara
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The second-annual Global Climate Action Symposium will bring together a wide range of experts to showcase climate change engagement by local student activists, scientists and engineers, business and policy experts, and artists. Jointly sponsored by Georgia Tech and #European consulates during European Climate Diplomacy Week, the event will be held virtually, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Event Details
Genomes are routinely subjected to DNA damage. But most cells have DNA repair systems that enforce genome stability and, ideally, prevent diseases like cancer. The trouble gets serious when these systems break down. When that happens, damage such as unrepaired DNA lesions can lead to tumors, and genomic chaos ensues.
“Double-strand breaks are one of the most dangerous types of DNA damage a cell can experience,” said Chance Meers, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University who earned his Ph.D. in molecular genetics in 2019 in the lab of Francesca Storici at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “They inhibit the cell’s ability to replicate its DNA, stalling cell division until the damage is repaired.”
The most accurate pathway of DNA-break repair is by using a homologous DNA sequence to template the re-synthesis of the damaged DNA region. Researchers in the Storici lab previously showed that a homologous RNA sequence could also mediate this break repair, and sought to understand the molecular mechanisms that control this process. They wrote about it in a recently published paper for the journal Molecular Cell.
“This is really about RNA’s capacity to transfer information to DNA that could be used in repairing damage,” explained Storici, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.
In a 2014 article published in Nature, her team explained how transcript-RNA could serve as a template for the repair of a DNA double-strand break. In this new study, according to lead author Meers, “we found that not only can RNA serve as a template for the repair of double-strand breaks, but that it was modifying genomic information in the absence of double-strand breaks.”
This modification of DNA even in the absence of an induced double-strand break was very surprising to the team. Also unanticipated, said Meers, was that the process of transferring information depended on the presence of an unexpected enzyme, DNA polymerase Zeta.
“This is quite surprising, because DNA polymerase Zeta is part of a large class of enzymes known as DNA polymerases characterized by their ability to catalyze the synthesis of DNA molecules from a DNA template,” Meers said.
Polymerase Zeta is part of a subset of DNA polymerases known as translesion DNA polymerases, which have unique properties that allow them to synthesize damaged DNA caused by mutagens like UV radiation. Translesion DNA polymerases also are important in cellular processes like the diversification of B-cell receptors used to recognize foreign elements like viruses.
Meers explained that RNA molecules can be thought of as the cache on a computer – or a short-term memory that is not stably maintained.
“We use a novel assay in which the yeast chromosomal DNA was genetically engineered to contain a piece of DNA sequence that allows it to be removed only in the RNA that is actively transcribed from the chromosomal DNA, generating a change in the RNA sequence but not in the DNA,” he said.
If this “short-term memory,” in the form of RNA, is transferred back into the DNA sequence during the process of RNA-templated DNA repair, it becomes “long-term memory” stored in the DNA, which can be thought of as the hard drive.
“We placed this system into a particular gene in yeast, which gives an observable characteristic trait if this process occurred, allowing us to track the repair process,” Meers said.
Exploiting such an assay, along with the discovery of a new role for DNA polymerase Zeta in RNA-templated DNA repair and modification, the study contains a series of new findings that helped the team better understand the genetic and molecular mechanisms by which RNA can change DNA sequences in cells.
This research essentially lays the groundwork for exploring the role that RNA can play in modifying genomic sequence and should allow future studies to more directly explore the role of RNA in genomic instability and, in particular, in other organisms, like humans.
This work was supported by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) of the NIH (grant numbers CA188347, P30CA056036 and GM136717 to A.V.M.), Drexel Coulter Program Award (to A.V.M.), the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) of the NIH (grant number GM115927 to F.S.), the National Science Foundation fund (grant number 1615335 to F.S.), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar (grant number 55108574 to F.S.), and grants from the Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology (NSF, DMS-1764406 and Simons Foundation, 594594 to F.S.). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.
CITATION: Chance Meers, Havva Keskin, Gabor Banyai, Olga Mazina, Taehwan Yang, Alli L. Gombolay, Kuntal Mukherjee, Efiyenia I. Kaparos, Gary Newnam, Alexander Mazin, and Francesca Storici. “Genetic characterization of three distinct mechanisms supporting RNA-driven DNA repair and 3 modification reveals major role of DNA polymerase Zeta.” (Molecular Cell, 2020) (https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/fulltext/S1097-2765(20)30554-2
Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA
Media Relations Assistance: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: Jerry Grillo
The Suddath Symposium, presented in a virtual format this year, is held annually to celebrate the life and contribution of F.L. "Bud" Suddath by discussing the latest developments in the fields of bioengineering and bioscience. The speakers include leading researchers across the world. This successful symposium has been taking place for 29 years! Each year the symposium topic changes.
Symposium Chairs: Nick Hud, Ph.D., and Loren Williams, Ph.D.
Visit: Suddath Symposium website
The 2021 Suddath Symposium is supported by the Parker H. Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.
Event Details
This virtual talk is a follow-up to Campus Surveillance Testing Town Halls held August 4 and August 20.
Patton Distinguished Professors Joshua S. Weitz and Greg Gibson will join JulieAnne Williamson, Executive Director of Sustainability and Building Operations at Georgia Tech and Team Lead for Campus Surveillance Testing Operations, to discuss campus cases and tracking, actions taken to date, and next steps.
Everyone is welcome! Join via BlueJeans Events. Q&A will follow the team's presentations. Please submit questions in advance using this event Q&A form. A video recap of this talk will be posted to cos.gatech.edu and @gtsciences social channels.
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This talk is hosted by the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech.
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Saad Bhamla, Ph.D.
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Georgia Instutute of Technology
ABSTRACT
In this talk I will share two stories about how interesting dynamics emerge when living systems aggregate and form a collective. The first story revolves around gigantic single cells protists (~5mm in length) that can contract their bodies rapidly (<5ms). I will describe our discovery of how these cells harness these ultrafast contractions to send ‘hydrodynamic trigger waves’ for communicating over long distances in cellular communities. The second story is about aquatic worm blobs that knot with their neighbours to form living entangled masses or blobs. I will describe how these soft squishy three dimensional blobs can rapidly morph their shape, move across terrains, and even solve mazes.
Host: David Hu, Ph.D.
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