Genetics + Genomics

Merging the wisdom of traditional global medicine with modern approaches

In this episode of AudioHelicase, Whitehead Institute Member Mary Gehring discusses how her research on the plant Arabidopsis thaliana reveals how gene regulation can be passed from one generation to the next.

Whitehead Institute Symposium, "Harnessing the Untapped Power of Plants for Human Health", allowed two leaders in plant biology, Whitehead Members Mary Gehring and Jing-Ke Weng, to provide a window into their research and to describe how plants are a major gateway to the future of biomedicine and biotechnology. In this video, Gehring discusses "Beyond the Gene: Epigenetic Control of Plant Development", which describes mechanisms that control gene expression without altering the DNA's sequence.

In this video, Whitehead Member Jing-Ke Weng's graduate student, Olesya Levsh, outlines her journey to Whitehead, which personified a commitment that is at the very heart of our mission: guiding and nurturing the next generation of scientists. Weng also described how he uses a muliple "-omics" platforms -- genomics, metabolomics, proteomics, and more -- to learn about the medicinal components found in some plants.

In October 2017, Whitehead Institute Director David Page presented Sex and Disease: Do males and females read their genomes differently?” at the Simon Center for the Social Brain speakers series. Dr. Page spoke about the comparative genomic and evolutionary studies of the sex chromosomes of humans, other mammals, birds, and reptiles conducted by him and his colleagues.

From his discovery of the first oncogene and tumor suppressor, to his work revealing critical aspects of the mutational basis of cancer, and more recently its metastatic behavior, Whitehead Founding Member Robert Weinberg’s work has been foundational in our understanding of cancer biology.