Seeing the Whole Blueprint: Uncovering the Purpose of “Genomic Junk”

Today, scientists know far more about the human genome—the blueprint of our lives— than was ever imagined when the Human Genome Project was undertaken in the 1990s. And we have entered an era where efficient gene editing is possible. Yet, we still lack a clear understanding of how the full genome works. We don’t know the function served by many of our genes; nor do we know the genes underlying many diseases.

Whitehead Institute Member Yukiko Yamashita postulates one reason we lack these key pieces of knowledge: there are many biological processes and phenomena that we do not even know exist, making it impossible to assign a gene’s function to them.
In this webinar, Yamashita will highlight ways in which fundamental research brings novel biological processes to light. And she will introduce her lab’s latest discoveries on the function of satellite DNA, which has long been regarded as “genomic junk.”

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Yukiko Yamashita
Member, Whitehead Institute

Yamashita earned both her B.S. in Biology (1994) and her Ph.D. in Biophysics (1999) from Kyoto University, where she conducted her graduate research in the lab of Mitsuhiro Yanagida. From 2001 to 2006, she did postdoctoral research in developmental biology in Margaret Fuller’s lab at Stanford University. She was appointed to the Michigan faculty in 2007 and was named an HHMI Investigator in 2014. She became a Member Whitehead Institute and a professor of biology at MIT in 2020.

Moderator
Ankur Jain
Member, Whitehead Institute; Assistant Prof. Biology, MIT

Jain received his bachelor’s degree with honors in biotechnology and biochemical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 2007, and earned a doctorate in Biophysics and Computational Biology at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2013. He conducted his postdoctoral research in the lab of Ronald Vale at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2018, he became a Member of Whitehead Institute and an assistant professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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