CBDS Seminar Series

Event time: 
Wednesday, April 6, 2022 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Event description: 

Steven Salzberg (Johns Hopkins School of Medicine)

“The human genome and our genes: How much are we missing?”

How many genes do we have? The Human Genome Project was launched with the promise of revealing all of our genes, the “code” that would help explain our biology. The publication of the genome in 2001 provided only a very rough answer to the question of how many genes we have, and a highly-fragmented draft genome sequence. For more than a decade following, the number of protein-coding genes steadily shrank, but the invention of RNA sequencing revealed a vast new world of splice variants and RNA genes.

In this talk, I will review where we’ve been and where we are today, and I will describe our use of an unprecedentedly large RNA sequencing resource to create a comprehensive new human gene database, containing thousands of novel genes and gene variants.  I will describe how we created new, more efficient algorithms to assemble 10,000 human RNA-seq experiments containing nearly 900 billion reads, and then to create a comprehensive new human gene catalog, called CHESS, that contains thousands of novel genes and gene variants. I will also discuss recent breakthroughs that have finally allowed the human genome itself to be completed, and how that effort has revealed hundreds of new genes that were previously hidden in the gaps.

Background

Steven Salzberg is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics and the Director of the Center for Computational Biology at Johns Hopkins University. From 2005-2011, he was the Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB) and the Horvitz Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. From 1997-2005 he was Senior Director of Bioinformatics at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland, one of the world’s leading DNA sequencing centers at the time. Prior to that, from 1989-97 he was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Salzberg received his B.A. degree in English and M.S. and M.Phil. degrees in Computer Science from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Dr. Salzberg has authored or co-authored over 300 scientific publications that have garnered over 250,000 citations, and his h-index is 152. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). In addition to his academic writing, he also writes a widely-read column at Forbes that focuses on science and pseudoscience.

Lab page: http://salzberg-lab.org
Forbes blog: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg

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