Health NewsTwitter Snips - March 31, 2010
The Duke Institute for Genomics Science and Policy appears to be strong user of Twitter and put this out to the Twitter community earlier this week:
@DukeIGSP "How can you not tweet a headline this? Tweet: Scientists decode songbird's genome. http://bit.ly/dsrkdA"
Seriously - how could you not post such a headline because when you click on the link that is exactly what you'll find at the top of a story about a team of scientists, led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis that has decoded the genome of a songbird. The Australian Zebra Finch to be exact.
While it is a clever story headline and a subsequent twitter posting, it is about a legitimate scientific event, that with the help of social media got people reading about the achievement. In many cases people well outside the science community heard about it and many science writers and journalists got wind of a story they might not come across otherwise.
Also big news among the science tweets and twits this week was the Myriad Patent case where the judge ruled 7 of the patents are invalid. Twitter's science and legal community posted within minutes of the decision coming down and over several days there were links to news stories and blog postings. The postings came from corporate accounts, scientists, science writers, academics and lawyers. If you ever wondered about the power of online media tools in the world of biotech or research you might want to take note of this. Conspicuous by their absence was Myriad itself while pundits, professors, post graduates, and professionals voiced their thoughts, opinions and predictions. We've included some of the twitter bits in this edition of Twitter Snips but in particular you should visit the web site for @genomicslawyer at http://www.genomicslawreport.com/ We have compiled many of the story links (not the Twitter postings ) on our GenOmics application at http://facebook.genomealberta.ca Apart from the featured stories on the ruling click on the News tab and you'll get a broad selection of news stories, blogs, videos, and images related to the ruling.
Video Introduction to Genomics
It isn't always easy to explain genetics and genomics to a non-scientist ( like me ) and Genetics for Dummies is a good start, but a particularly exciting read. I remember when I was working at Olds Agricultural College trying to learn about simple and recessive genes in the horse world and still have the occasional scary moment trying to remember the science behind breeding a cremello coloured (cream genes with a red or chestnut to produce cremello) horse.
However with powerful new graphics, animation, and video tools available plus the incredible sharing potential of the web, that learning process can become a lot easier.
For example, genomicseducation.ca: Exploring the gene scene is run by Genome British Columbia, one of the other members of the Genome Canada 'family. As the site itself points out "genetics and genomics can be fascinating but has a reputation for being difficult and/or boring. Plus, the field is always changing." I think they have found some good ways around that.
The site has put together some nice tools for activities, a glossary, and education resources broken down by grades.
What are really great though, are 5 new presentations uploaded in the last week or so.
I have embedded them all on this blog posting so you can watch them in sequence easily, and as with all embeded videos you can click on a video to go to the YouTube channel for genomicseducation where there are other presentations worth checking out.
I still shudder remembering my horse colour genetic chart but tools like this would have made life a lot easier.
Enjoy the series.
Gluten and Gluten Intolerance: Part 2
You know that if you cross a cocker spaniel with a poodle, you get a cockapoo unless you’re down under. In Australia, the resulting offspring is a called a spoodle. I’m sure they are the same hybrid dog. And being a hybrid means that these dogs have half the chromosomes from each breed. The hybrids do not themselves breed true. In a cross of two cockapoo, the next generation may express a variety of characteristics. If looked at individually, these characteristics might be explained through Mendel’s Laws which he developed cross breeding pea plants. When it comes to wheat, our understanding of the rules completely changes. Our concept of species is challenged by the complexity of a genome that contains more than 16 billion basepairs. The human genome in comparison contains only about 3 billion basepairs – 1/5 the number found in wheat.
Blogging from a Board Meeting
Genome Alberta's Board of Directors met in the Alastair Ross/Calgary Technologies Inc. building in Calgary yesterday.
You don't normally expect to see a blog posting coming out of a Board meeting but while there are always some confidential matters on Board agendas, there are things that can be shared.
The Genome Alberta Board is currently made up of Dennis Fitzpatrick (chair), Art Froehlich, Kevin Keough, Marv Fritzler, Jennifer Stewart Smith, Stella Thompson, Lorne Babiuk and Randy Goebel. Senior staff members attend Genome Alberta Board meetings as well and there are observers from government and Genome Canada.
To help keep travel costs down and to manage busy schedules, Genome Alberta has been making more use of teleconferencing . Thanks to a new teleconferencing system in the CTI building with microphones and speakers wired directly into the room, we have dispensed with speakerphones. The net result is better sound for those in the room and on the phone. We use Go-To Meeting to link up the presentations and it is tough to make an argument for the costs associated with travel to a single location because the system works so well.
Like the Board meetings for many other organizations there were the usual reports from staff and committees to get through but there are a couple of points worth noting from today.
Synthetic Biology
Consider this a short and sweet blog posting because I happened to come across this while working on some links for our PhytoMetaSyn project.
We hear a lot about synthetic biology but it isn't alway clear what it means. Thanks to Scientific American for offering up this explanation:
And from a Synthetic Biology Workshop I attended in the Fall of 2009 in Toronto, this quick image:
A Clever Periodic Table from Sciencebase
The 'bidding' for a spot on David Bradley's Periodic Table of Science Bloggers has been fast and furious for several days now. It started on March 18th when David, who is behind the sciencebase.com blog took the familiar Periodic Table and bent it a bit in a very clever manner that has turned out to be a big hit.
For instance the element formerly known as Lithium (Li) is now David Bradley on LinkedIn. Ti, or Titanium, becomes the sciencebase account on Twitter, and the link to the main sciencebase blog page replaces Antimony in the number 51 spot.
While David is a pretty busy guy online there is no way he could find enough of his own activities for the entire Table. Besides, David knows what science communication is all about and realised there was an opportunity to reach out to the online community of science bloggers and writers and put out the challenge to other people to finish off the table. I haven't had the opportunity to ask him, but I'm willing to bet he didn't expect to see everyone take to it so quickly. He suggested it would be nice to fill it before the end of the month but he filled in just 3 days. It wasn't bidding in the true sense of the word perhaps, because David wasn't out to sell the spots. Rather it was a case of everyone making a pitch to be included and trying to be inventive at time to make initials, subject matter or location fit an element.
This wasn't just a pitch exercise to come up with a neat graphic.
It is a hyperlinked table at http://www.sciencebase.com/periodic-table-of-david-bradley.html where can click on one of the elements and you'll jump to the new matching blog or website. It generated a lot of comments on the original blog posting and enough Twitter activity to spread the word. In the process everyone involved in posting their suggestions got a kind of a virtual introduction to each other and to their work, and anyone else following the comments likely had a whole new world of links open up.
David as @sciencebase and Genome Alberta as @mikesgene follow each other on Twitter and I'm pleased to say that I saw his post very early on and pushed Gallium out in favour of Genome Alberta's blog pages.
Tomorrow's Children
That clip from the 1934 movie Tomorrow's Children gives you some idea of how genetics and ethics were part of society and law long before the implications of the Human Genome Project brought the issues into the mainstream media.
That movie of course is just one small example, because the debate around how health, medicine, and ethics co-exist, goes back to the Hippocratic School of 400 B.C. It is a debate which crosses culture and religions, and covers a wide range of topics from eugenics to organ transplants, and the more recent political and societal machinations around stem cell research and therapy.
There are no right or wrong answers but there are many questions to be answered that require open debate to help inform public policy, and to identify research priorities based on socially-relevant questions. We're addressing high tech medicine and genetics with regulations, laws, and ethical considerations developed in a very different world - in some cases that movie world of 76 years ago - and we need to address the new challenges accordingly.
One way to address the gap is to bring the experts together which is what Genome Canada's GPS series: GPS: Where Genomics, Public Policy and Society Meet" endeavours to do.
The events take place 3 times a year in Ottawa - definitely the place to find federal policy makers. The first one was held in November 2009 and the next event is coming up one month from now on April 16th.
Interview with Paul Gordon on Semantic Web Technologies
guest post from Susanne Cardwell
Administrative Coordinator
Bioinformatics Platform Applied Computational Genomics Course
Paul Gordon, the Bionformatics specialist for the Sun Center of Excellence for Visual Genomics, gave the following description of Semantic Web Technologies and how they relate to the programs he is developing called Daggoo and Seahawk:
“In a nutshell,” says Paul Gordon, “Semantic Web technologies are about using URLs instead of words to refer to concepts.” He says that the advantage is that URLs (i.e., Web addresses like http://...) are unambiguous – it’s easier for computers to use URLs as computers have historically had problems with interpreting natural language. He states that the reason you want to use URLs in this capacity is so that the computer can surf the web for you instead of you manually trying to find answers on the web. “In short, it is about having a web of data instead of a web of documents,” says Gordon. One major problem is how to shoehorn the current Web into this Semantic model, and this is his primary focus.
Twitter Snips - March 15, 2010
We are still waiting for the day that genetics or genomics becomes a major trending on Twitter but the past couple of weeks definitely showed the International science community is using the online tool and that genetics and personalized medicine have a niche worth holding on to.
Actress Glenn Close had her genome sequenced and it was immediately fodder for 140 character comments from fans, the media and the science community. With such a braod range of people posting the comments covered the gamut as well but it does show just what can happen and how you can create buzz that surpasses the significance of the story. @dgmacarthur commented on the story in his Genetic Future post: "Celebrity genomics without the Y chromosome: Glenn Close has her genome sequenced: Zoe McDou... http://bit.ly/bF3DrJ "
The Genomics Environments and Traits Conference also knows as GETS also made the round on Twitter. It is taking place in April and 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey made this Twitter post about the event: " Darn, can't make it to Boston for this, http://www.getconference.org/ . One of a kind meeting of sequenced homo sapiens. Lilly is jealous!"
We tweeted part of our Epigenetics workshop and drew comments from all over the world including this one: "@chrisadieni @mikesgene It was thanks to @WhereBioBegins that I learned #epigenetics is where protein phosphorylation meets genomics. Anyone there agree?"
So all that talk you heard about Twitter being a place where people share information about what they had for breakfast? We're here to tell you that there is far more to it than that. Read more to see more from the tweeter set.
Genomics of Gluten and Gluten Intolerance: Part I
SRO for Epigenetics
It turned out to be standing room only for our epigentics workshop on Friday, March 12th.
I introduced the workshop and some of the speakers in a previous blog post and thought a little follow up was in order. There were 40 people there from government, industry, academia, and non-for-profit and the range of interests covered both human and animal epigenetics. If there was a common theme it was that epigenetics is an important field of study to be in right now and that Alberta has such strong bioinformatics expertise as well as some strong niche science expertise, that we should be leading the charge in Canada.
We'll be making most of the presentation available to view here on our website but here is the first one of the day which came from Dr. Marv Fritzler who set the stage for some of the discussion around an epigenetics and personalized medicine strategy:
Epigenetics and Personalized Medicine
Two of the latest hot topics in lthe life sciences come together in one workshop on Friday in the Calgary Technologies building where Genome Alberta calls home. Epigenetics is obviously a hot topic these days because it did after all make the cover of Time Magazine earlier this year. Personalized medicine makes its way into everything from government health care debates to the MIT Tecnhology Review. We're bringing together some pretty good people in the field as a first step in an epigenetics network in Alberta with the ultimate objective of building a complete epigenetics research strategy.
Epigenetics is the study of changes in appearance or gene expression caused by factors other than changes to the underlying DNA in an organism. As the Time Magazine article pointed out , it kind of messes with what many of us thought we had learned about nature and nurture. New research however says there are changes that can happen and be passed down through generations.
Here is the agenda for the morning:
9:00a Welcome and Introductions (Bob Church)
9:05a Genome Alberta's Role (David Bailey)
9:20a Personalized Medicine - It's Role in Alberta (Marvin Fritzler)
9:40a A Computational Environment for the Characterization of Epigenetic Phenomena (Christoph Sensen)
10:00a Break
10:20a Molecular Biomarkers in Personalized Medicine: A Public Health Perspective (Alaa Badawi)
10:40a Circulating Nucelic Acids as Biomarkers in Disease Detection and Treartment in Animals and Humans (Howard Urnovitz)
11:00a Maternal and Child Health Genomics Initiative for Alberta and Canada (Brent Scott)
11:20a Next Steps (Ted Bilyea)
PrP New Media Follow up
We had a few technical problems at the New Media session today so here is some of what I promised I'd post.
Check my blog posting from earlier this week for links to what Colin Anderson, Stephane McLachlan, and Valerie Sim have been up to.
The video that did not work today is often referred to as Socialnomics or Social Media Revolution. Seems to depend on where you get the link from but here it is:
You are also free to download my presentation on slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/mspear but here it is if you just wanted to look at it again. Check back later for some more links once I've got caught up. Enjoyed the session today and look forward to seeing what everyone has planned.
Canada's Prion Research Conference
Ah the elusive Prion. The folded protein behind BSE, CJD, Chronic Wasting disease, and playing a role in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and ALS.
And there you have it. My entire knowledge base (well almost), though when I was the Marketing and Communications Manager for Alberta Beef Producers I was a litte more up on the latest developments. I'm a bit rusty these days, which is eactly why I'm in the Prion 101 workshop at the Prion Research Conference in Ottawa. Time to brush up.
The session is being run by Dr. Scott Napper, is an Associate Profesor at the University of Saskatchewan as well as the Program Manager of Emerging Diseases at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization. Prions lead to a novel form of infectious disease that results from the misfolding of a normal cellular protein. Dr. Napper likened it to a kind of molecular peer pressure because the proteins cause other proteins to do the same thing resulting in a cascading effect to the disease. One of the challenges is that what we do know about prions does not account for all the complexities we see and it would appear that there is a LOT that we don't know about prions and related disease.
This conference while it may have answers, will likely raise a lot of questions with the 300 attendees from around the world.
So what's the Communications Director from Genome Alberta doing hanging out with a bunch of Prion researchers?
New media, what else.
Science Fairs – Independent Project-based Learning
I recently participated in a Genome Alberta challenge to put forward a short video explaining Where Bio began for me. It was a lot of fun putting that little video together and it made me think about what influenced my interest in science. Many young students get their first real start in the sciences through independent project-based learning we know as Science Fair. For almost 50 years, Science Fairs have been organized across Canada. Science Fairs are held in elementary and secondary schools, outstanding projects are entered in regional fairs, and approximately 500 students meet (this year in Peterborough) at a Canada-Wide Science Fair. Past Science Fair participants and winners probably represent a Who’s Who among scientists in North America. I expect this to be documented in the next year or two.
Drum Roll Please
We didn't break any records for entries to our 'Where Bio Began For Me' video contest but that doesn't matter, we're happy with the exposure we did get.
We've come into contact with some interesting people over the last few weeks, raised the profile of our GenOmics application and our blog, and we have some new video content linked to us on YouTube.
And of course we have winners:
Christopher Dieni from Penn State and Mostafa Abdellateef from the Genome Canada Bioinformatics Platform.
They win the iPod Shuffle and we'll be in touch with them soon to arrange delivery of these tiny music machines.
It doesn't end there however, as we have more stuff to give away next week.
