The Rockefeller University - Centennial Scientific Symposium

Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending The Rockefeller University’s Centennial Scientific Symposium. Dr. Eric Lander, founder of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, delivered a fascinating talk on recent advances in the field of genomics.

Moore’s Law hypothesized that technology power would roughly double every 18 months and the law has held true for almost all technology disciplines.  In his talk, Dr. Lander estimated that the Broad’s sequencing power has increased 100,000-fold over the last 5 years due to the implementation of second generation sequencing technologies – thus shattering Moore’s Law.  The amount of data points the Broad is able to produce is astonishing, but that data means nothing if there is no way to decipher it.

Up until roughly 2005, the genomics community focused almost exclusively on gene mapping – comparing coding regions of the genome to find variants that could be correlated with disease.  It was believed that by comparing hundreds of genomes with new sequencing technologies, researchers would be able to find clear correlations between gene variants and disease, but that has not been the case.  A small cadre of geneticists has proposed a different course of research, to look for answers in non-coding sections of the genome.

Dr. John Rinn of the Broad Institute recently discovered a class of non-protein coding RNAs called large intervening non-coding RNA, or LincRNA.  Deep sequencing studies have found LincRNAs to be evolutionary conserved sequences and map to intergenic regions.   When specific LincRNAs are knocked out they can have a profound effect on everything from gene regulation to protein trafficking. While non-coding sequences were once thought of as genetic trash, Dr. Rinn’s work indicates that non-coding sequences provide a wealth of genetic information. 

Recently published work by Dr. John Rinn and a number of his contemporaries have shown that our understanding of genomics is still in its infancy. Comparative genomics will ultimately lead to improved clinical outcomes for patients, but the full potential of genomics cannot be unlocked until we a more comprehensive understanding of how coding and non-coding sections of the genome interact to regulate disease pathways.