Event

Nanopore sequencing, first conceived in the mid-90s, has now emerged as a commerical instrument for portable, fast, and potentially cheap DNA characterization. I will briefly describe three of our recent applications of the MinION to studies of human health. First, I will describe our work in developing methylation detection on the MinION; we have developed a custom bioinformatics package to extract and classify the current levels of potentially methylated sites from MinION data, providing . Secondly, I will describe our work in using nanopore sequencing for infectious disease diagnosis on clinical samples from Johns Hopkins Hospital. And finally, I will detail our efforts to measure structural variation occurring in pancreatic cancer using nanopore sequencing, a possible application for early detection and therapeutic monitoring.
 

Winston Timp is an assistant professor in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He earned bachelor degrees in Biochemsitry, Chemistry, Physics and Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana. He then earned his a masters and PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT examining bacterial cell signaling, and trained as a postdoc at Johns Hopkins studying the epigenetics of cancer. The Timp Lab’s aim is to decipher the biophysical basis of gene regulation, integrating information from genetics, epigenetics and systems biology. To accomplish this, we are generating a unique and diverse toolset, ranging from nanotechnology and biophysics, to microfluidics and tissue engineering, and sequencing and computational biology. If we understand how genetic regulation goes awry in human disease, we may be able to develop better screening tools, or even prophylactic treatment.