Presidential Lectures

This Biotech Symposium will focus on perspectives on big data in biology from leading practitioners in the field.

Circadian (~24 hour) clocks are endogenous mechanisms that time the recurring, daily activities observed in most organisms. These clocks are genetically regulated, and generate biochemical oscillations within individual cells composing most tissues. Recently our laboratory has searched for and identified genes that affect the homeostatic regulation of sleep in Drosophila. This research has uncovered specific neurons whose activity promotes sleep.

While autism clearly involves altered function of the central nervous system, the neuropathology of the disorder remains controversial. This is due in part,to the enormous complexity of the disorder, which likely has many causes and many biological trajectories. It is also due to the fact that few neuroimaging studies involve very young children or severely affected individuals. This lack of information is compounded by the fact that findings at the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) level of analysis cannot be confirmed and extended to the cellular level due to a lack of postmortem brains.