Christopher Mason, PhD, Associate Professor, Physiology and Biophysics; Co-Director, WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction, Weill Cornell Medicine
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 seminar, new discoveries from RNA- and DNA-sequencing across dozens of cities on Earth will be detailed, including the analysis of wastewater as a means to track SARS-CoV-2 levels, and also explore the investigation of new species found on the International Space Station. 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 around the world and in real-time. Finally, these methods and molecular tools work together to guide comprehensive, longitudinal, multi-omic views of human astronaut physiology in the NASA Twins Study, 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.