Christopher Mason: A 500 Year Plan for Genetics, Epigenetics and Cell Engineering

The avalanche of easy-to-create genomics data has impacted almost all areas of medicine and science, from cancer patients and microbial diagnostics to molecular monitoring for astronauts in space. In this lecture, new discoveries from RNA- and DNA-sequencing with the FDA’s SEQC study show the ability of single-molecule methods to reveal rare alleles and provide more comprehensive epigenomics maps of patients and cancers. Also, recent technologies and algorithms from our laboratory and others demonstrate that an integrative, cross-kingdom view of patients (precision metagenomics) holds unprecedented biomedical potential to discern risk, improve diagnostic accuracy, and to map both genetic and epigenetic states, as well as clonal changes in mutations with clonal hematopoiesis. Finally, these methods and molecular tools work together to guide comprehensive, longitudinal, multi-omic views of human astronaut physiology and biology in the NASA Twins Study and several other missions with SpaceX and Axiom, which lay the foundation for future, long-duration spaceflight, including sequencing, quantifying, and engineering genomes to survive on other planets over the next 500 years (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/next-500-years).

Christopher E. Mason, Ph.D.

• Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY
• Director, WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction and WorldQuant Foundation Research Scholar
• Professor of Computational Genomics in Computational Biomedicine in the Institute for Computational Biomedicine
• Professor of Neuroscience in the Brain and Mind Institute (secondary appointment)

Meeting link: