Eugene W. Myers, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA

Lectures

Arguably the most significant contribution of the human genome project is that we can now build a recombinant construct of every gene and every promotor in C. elegans (worm), D. melanogaster (fly), M. musculus (mouse), and H. sapiens (human). These include fluorescent proteins and other markers that can be induced at controlled time points via a change in temperature, light, or chemistry. Combined with tremendous advances in light and electron microscopy in recent years, I believe we are now poised to visualize the meso-scale of the cell, and the development small organs (e.g. a fly's brain) and organisms (e.g. the worm) at the resolution of individual cells.

These advances will require new imaging and data-mining methods for what I call “imaging bioinformatics”. Many of the problems resemble those that arising in medical imaging but at a different scale and resolution. Toward this end, my group is working on a number of imaging projects along these lines. These include (a) the biophysica of mitosis, (b) studies of gene expression in individual cells within the worm C.

Elegans, (c) a detailed reconstruction of a fly's brain including it developmental partitioning into linages, and (d) a high-throughput microscope to image the volume of an entire mouse brain at 1 micro resolution (4.2 trillion voxels) in less than a week. I will spend my lectures introducing the relevant biological background and the nature of the computational problems, as well as going into some detail on the major methods we employ to solve these problems.


Brief Biosketch

Dr. Eugene W. Myers is a Group Leader at the new Janelia Farms Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was one of the first computer scientist to enter the field of computational molecular biology in the early 80’s, and was a key developer of BLAST and other similarity search tools in the 90’s. In 1995 he and Jim Weber proposed the whole genome shotgun sequencing of the human genome, and in 1998 he joined the founding Celera team to accomplish that mission. At Celera his team produced reconstructions of the Drosophila, Human, Mouse, and Anopheles genomes.
Dr. Myers received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1981 at the Univeristy of Colorado. He has since authored more than ninety peer-reviewed articles and four patents. Dr. Myers was awarded the Newcomb Cleveland Award for best article in Science in 2001 and the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award in 2002. In 2003 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. In 2004 he won the International Max Planck Prize and in 2006 he was elected to the German National Academy of Science, Leopoldina. His research interests have centered on the design and analysis of algorithms in discrete pattern matching, computer graphics, and computational molecular biology. His current interest is developing algorithms and software for the automatic interpretation of images produced by light and electron microscopy of stained samples with a particular emphasis on building 3D and 4D “atlases” of brains, developing organisms, and cellular processes.