Todd Harris, PhD

Facilitating scientific discovery at the intersection of genetics, genomics, bioinformatics, big data, cloud computing, and open science.

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End of an era: The C. elegans genetic map is now frozen.

August 2, 2012 By Todd Harris Leave a Comment

Nearly 50 years after Sydney Brenner’s letter to Max Perutz set the wheels in motion for the use of Caenorhabditis elegans as a potent genetic model system, leading eventually to six Nobel prizes and a global research community numbering in the thousands, a new threshold has been crossed.

Starting with the latest release of the C. elegans genome (WS232 in worm-speak), the genetic map is now FROZEN. Recombinational distances have changed very little over the last three years, a testament both to the fine granularity of the genetic map as well as — perhaps — to shifting tides in experimental approaches.

New mutations, deficiencies and rearrangements will still be placed on the map but simply assigned an interpolated genetic position.

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Filed Under: genome sequencing Tagged With: Andy Fire, Bob Horvitz, C. elegans, Craig Mello, genetics, John Sulston, Marty Chalfie, milestone, Sydney Brenner

Welcome!
My name is Todd Harris. A geneticist by training, I now work at the intersection of biology and computer science developing tools and systems to organize, visualize, and query large-scale genomic data across a variety of organisms.

I'm driven by the desire to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and to improve the transparency and reproducibility of the scientific process.

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