It started with a call to action: On Dec. 12, the first anniversary of the Paris Agreement, gather around the dinner table with friends and other community members to discuss climate action. Organizers from GOOD Magazine and the Earth To Coalition hoped that this grassroots movement, given the incoming administration, would inspire people to keep climate action at the top of minds. ISB answered the call and decided to host…
Earth To Dinner: In December 2015, 195 global leaders came together to adopt the historic Paris Agreement – the world’s first comprehensive climate agreement. GOOD, in partnership with the #EarthTo coalition (100+ partners strong), has created the #EarthToDinner (earthtodinner.org) climate conversation dinner series to keep climate action on the table. Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) is hosting dinner for 50 at its labs in the South Lake Union neighborhood of…
The Baliga Lab’s Dr. Christopher Plaisier was the lead author of the study “Causal Mechanistic Regulatory Network for Glioblastoma Deciphered Using Systems Genetics Network Analysis” which published online in Cell Systems on July 14. Dr. Plaisier wrote a summary of the research: 3 Bullets: Using data from TCGA and ENCODE, ISB researchers developed integrative database and analysis platforms that provide insight about the underpinnings of glioblastoma multiforme. Researchers developed a…
NIH Research Matters published an article on our tuberculosis paper. “The incredibly large number of possible drug combinations taken together with the difficulty of growing Mtb in the laboratory make discovery of effective combination therapy extremely challenging,” Dr. Nitin Baliga says. “We hope that our systems-based strategy will accelerate TB drug discovery by helping researchers prioritize combinations that are more likely to be effective.” READ THE ARTICLE
Gallery above: Dr. Anne Thompson and research assistant Allison Lee traveled to Station ALOHA in Hawaii on a research cruise to collect water samples and various species of organisms. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. OCE-1558924. What’s the “invisible forest” and what does it have to do with environmental research? Dr. Anne Thompson who was in the Baliga Lab at…
The Baliga Lab and colleagues at Center for Infectious Disease Research published (online in advance of print) this landmark study today in the journal Nature Microbiology: Seattle researchers created a genetic blueprint of the cunning tuberculosis bacteria, then used it to predict and rank potential drug targets 3 Bullets: Researchers at the Institute for Systems Biology and Center for Infectious Disease Research have deciphered how the human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis…
ISB’s Project Feed 1010 is building a global, crowd-sourced network of educators, students, researchers and farmers to optimize and scale-up sustainable agriculture practices and educate the future scientific workforce. To support this global network, we have partnered with Northeastern University to develop database, web and mobile infrastructures with functionalities for data tracking, monitoring, analytics and predictive modeling. More than 20 graduate-level computer science students enrolled in an interactive course have…
ISB’s Project Feed 1010 is building a global, crowd-sourced network of educators, students, researchers and farmers to optimize and scale-up sustainable agriculture practices and educate the future scientific workforce. To support this global network, we have partnered with Northeastern University to develop database, web and mobile infrastructures with functionalities for data tracking, monitoring, analytics and predictive modeling. For the next 10 weeks, more than 20 graduate-level computer science students will…
In a newly published research, members of the Baliga and Price labs share discoveries from their studies of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii – Chlamy for short. Excerpt: To the casual observer, algae may appear to be a nuisance. But for researchers, photosynthetic microalgae and other microbes have the potential to become sustainable biofactories that can economically produce renewable biofuels and a wide variety of other valuable commodities. One such group of microalgae…
Attend Xconomy’s Seattle 2035 on Oct. 30 at ISB’s event space (401 Terry Ave. N., Room 106). This conference, co-hosted by Northeastern University, highlights the next 20 years and beyond to explore long-term prospects of the local high-tech economy and what we can do to keep Seattle a city of the future. ISB President Dr. Lee Hood and ISB SVP and Director Dr. Nitin Baliga are featured speakers. The event…
ISB is crowdfunding for the first time. We are raising money to support high school science teachers and their students to become citizen scientists for Project Feed 1010, our new study that aims to optimize aquaponics and that will impact #STEM education. Watch our video: https://www.crowdrise.com/ProjectFeed101024forScience #24forScience
3 Bullets Rapid climate change, including ocean acidification caused by increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, is predicted to affect the oceans, sea life, and the global carbon cycle. Marine microalgae, including diatoms, are responsible for converting CO2 into oxygen and biologically usable carbon through photosynthesis. How these organisms will respond over the short and long term to rising CO2 is unknown. Growth experiments and transcriptomic analyses performed by UW and…
On May 7, ISB hosted the first-ever screening of BIO·FICTION in North America. More than 120 people attended the event, which took place as part of the South Lake Union Art Walk. BIO·FICTION explores the emerging field of synthetic biology from different disciplinary angles including science and engineering, social science, cultural studies, amateur biology, filmmaking, art and design. The original program had presentations, panel discussions, do-it-yourself biology demos, performances, art…
Scanning EM of bacteria being eaten by white blood cell Photo Credit: Adrian Ozinsky 3 Bullets: Nearly a decade ago, ISB’s Baliga Lab published a landmark paper describing cMonkey, an innovative method to accurately map gene networks within any organism from microbes to humans. Two new papers describe the benchmark results of cMonkey and also the release of cMonkey2, which performs with higher accuracy. Using this approach, genetic and molecular…
3 Bullets: The disease progression of tuberculosis is extremely complex and it’s poorly understood. ISB and Seattle BioMed researchers have made an important step by developing a comprehensive map of gene regulation in tuberculosis. A resulting open-access web portal offers any scientist the ability to mine the collected data. By ISBUSA Tuberculosis (TB) remains a top global health threat due to its remarkable complexity in disease progression. To help understand…
Gov. Jay Inslee hosted a round table discussion today at Institute for Systems Biology with a group of invited college students, who were asked to share their thoughts on the affordability of education. We were honored to be able to provide the venue. ISB has had a long history of supporting systemic change at the K-12 school district level to improve the quality and access of STEM education. Now, our…
This is an excerpt from Environmental Microbiology Reports, 2015, authored by Arjun Raman, a postdoc in the Baliga Lab here at Institute for Systems Biology. The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over four billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An…
The journal “Trends in Microbiology” recently published a spotlight article on a tuberculosis research collaboration between scientists at Institute for Systems Biology and Seattle BioMed. The paper “The DNA-binding network of Mycobacterium tuberculosis” was published in the journal “Nature Communications” (Jan. 12, 2015): “MTB employs about 200 different molecular switches to sense and respond to the shifting, hostile landscape of the host. To identify and understand the intertwining gene regulatory…
