The Golden State Killer, a sinister figure who terrorized Californians between 1974 and 1986, was apprehended on April 24, 2018. This elusive predator, known by various monikers such as the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker, committed heinous acts, including at least 13 murders, over 50 rapes, and…

On April 25th, 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. This paper helped Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962 (Rosalind Franklin had died). Unraveling the structure of DNA was an inflection point…

At the intersection of biology and technology Recently we debuted the GenRAIT podcast, where we discuss the broad industry space that we aim to serve, the space where biology and technology merge together. You can listen to the podcasts at their dedicated website, or you can also subscribe with Apple podcasts and Spotify. The first four episodes: Amanda Vondras: assembling genomes to predicting grapes (Apple, Spotify)

More than 40 years ago my mother got a shocking result in her yearly check-up when she was a new immigrant to the US: she had very high cholesterol. The doctors were perplexed, because she was thin and did not have a cholesterol-heavy diet (remember when eggs were bad?). They…

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, you’ve been reading about and experiencing how the new generation of artificial intelligence bots has changed the world and our perceptions of humanity. These systems are simple at a high level; they’re LLMs trained on the whole internet (up to 2021 for ChatGPT…

If you were in and around genetics laboratories in the early 2010’s, one thing would be immediately apparent: CRISPR was going to revolutionize the field. Many research groups were shifting from their long-preferred genetic engineering techniques to the CRISPR methodology in the course of one year, 2013. …

What do we plan to do about it? Most of you have probably seen the NHGRI chart that illustrates the crash in the sequencing cost per human genome. To get some perspective, it cost $3 billion to sequence the first human genome over ten years in the year 2000, while…

Furthering the life science data revolution in plant and animal genomics During the second week of January 2023, the GenRAIT leadership team attended the Plant & Animal Genome Conference in San Diego, where we had a booth. Contrary to normal expectations, California was raining. But nothing could dampen our expectations…

In the year 2000, there was one single human genome. In 2010 there were fewer than 100 human genomes (you could look them up in a spreadsheet!). Today there are likely 1,000,000 human genomes. Good luck cataloging them all. Outside of the purview of our species, there are now efforts…