Thursday, 5 of September

Today we listened to the amazing and very cognitive lecture by George Church from Harvard Medical School. He was talking about new technologies and databases such as

FISSEQ - Fluorescent In Situ Sequencing;

PGP - Personal Genome Project;

CRISPR - Genome Engineering Resources.

The FISSEQ method includes sequencing-by-synthesis via few single-base extensions.

CRISPR is a microbial nuclease which protect cell from invading phages and plasmids.

It's a great idea to create a large database like Personal Genome Project and share data with other scientists from all over the world. This data can be used for sequencing transcriptomes, immunomes, microbiomes so it's very important for scientific progress.

Rafal Smigrodzki from Gencia Corporation gave a short lecture in session called "Mitochondria". Mitochondrial disfunction in aging found expression in supression of oxidative phosphorylation and an increasing of glycolysis. It was noted that stimulation of mitochondrial activity can supresses neoplastic growth, improves cellular function and aged animal cognition. It's going to take an important place in aging therapies.

Dirk Hockemeyer from University of California at Berkeley told us about molecular mechanisms of telomerase regulation in genetically defined human stem cell models. It's well known that disfunction of telomerases can lead to aging and tumorigenesis. Dick and collegues used a site-specific nucleases to genetically engineer human pluripotent stem cells and studied the two main regulatory processes of human telomerase function in a stem cells system( transcriptional regulation and the recruitment of the telomerase holoenzyme to telomers).