Whether they were listening to the speakers and their presentations or frantically writing questions on note cards to pass to the usher, students, faculty and community members packed Franklin Theater at The Franklin Institute for a lecture and question-and-answer discussion on recent advancements in the study of genomics.
The Penn Genome Frontiers Institute and The Franklin Institute co-sponsored “Evolving Genomes: Human Origins and Our Microbial Passengers” on Tuesday night. This was a free opportunity for the public to learn about human and microbial evolution.
The event began with three speakers, all Penn professors, and was followed by a five-member panel discussion that answered questions from the audience.
The lecture began with professor of Biology and PGFI co-director Junhyong Kim, who spoke on “Genomes and Genealogy as Revealed by Computational Biology,” continued with Sarah Tishkoff, professor of Genetics and Biology who spoke on “An African Odyssey Through the Human Genome” and concluded with professor of Microbiology Frederic Bushman and his presentation on “Microbes in our Body: Life Partners in Health and Disease.”
Kim, whose presentation elicited constant chuckles from the audience, emphasized that “genomics is about learning to read this book,” or the 3 billion DNA letters — nucleotides — that compose the human genome.
The field of computational biology which can, in 2010, sequence 20 billion letters a day, has seen significant advancements since Kim started in 1980 when only a mere 1.5 letters could be sequenced. Kim added that this 13-billion-fold increase in efficiency is seen in no other field so everyone should “invest in science”.
College freshman Martin Falk attended the event and enjoyed learning about the new and innovative research advancing the field.
“It was really interesting to see the great depth of scholarship that goes on here at Penn,” he added.
Tuesday night’s event is the fourth symposium in the ongoing PGFI-TFI partnership series that occurs twice a year. Previous topics addressed in the series were the influence of genomics in personalized medicine, stem cell biology and age-dependent diseases.
A recording of this event will soon be available along with already available recordings of past PGFI-TFI events on the PGFI website.
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