Vendredi 04 mars 2016 à 14h15
Auditoire Stueckelberg, Ecole de Physique

60 years of genome biology: from that X-ray picture to generating petabytes of data every day

Jacques Rougemont, EPF Lausanne

In 1953, Crick and Watson deciphered the structure of the DNA molecule. This has triggered both a conceptual and technological revolution that underlies the current biological ''data deluge''. I will give a general overview of how this development took place, from understanding how genomes evolve, to sequencing (i.e. reading) the complete human genome (and many other species), to eventually studying its function in ever finer details. In particular I will show how we have moved from a static and binary (qualitative) description of these functions to an increasingly continuous and dynamic picture as a consequence of an expanding repertoire of experimental techniques based on the biology of DNA. These techniques can produce large amounts of data rapidly and cheaply but require increasingly complex analysis and modelling efforts.