KOSEN 한인과학기술자네트워크

Seventh Meeting of H3Africa Consortium

Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) promotes the development of collaborative African genetics and genomics research by African investigators in order to contribute to the improvement of health in African populations. Launched in October of 2012, H3Africa involves twenty-six research groups comprised of over 500 investigators 27 African countries.Please join us for the H3Africa Project Presentation Sessions of the 7th H3Africa Consortium Meeting on Tuesday, October 11 in the Masur Auditorium. The day will include, presentations from seven H3Africa projects highlighting investigations in non-communicable and infectious disease, an overview of H3Africa？？？s Genome Analysis and Ethics and Community Engagement achievements, and presentations from NIH Director Francis Collins, Professor Dame Kay Davies of the Wellcome Trust, and Director Jim Anderson of the NIH Common Fund. There will also be an afternoon session for poster presentations.

For more information go to http://h3africa.org/

H3Africa Consortium

This discussion？？？s purpose is to provide a forum for H3Africa Fellows at the Washington DC meeting in which they can discuss professional development and other aspects of a career in science with members of the NIH community.

For more information go to http://h3africa.org

Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series

There is an increasing need in the life and medical sciences to determine gene sequence and gene expression in cells and tissues, including in pathogenic organisms and viruses under normal and disease conditions as well as organismal development. The limitations in diagnostic and prognostic tools have triggered interest in utilizing RNA present in extracellular fluid such as plasma and urine. RNA sequence analysis has the advantage of providing sequence as well as abundance information, and it also contains information such as the allelic sequence, mutations, or translocations, traditionally only mined by genomic DNA sequencing. There is reduced complexity at the RNA level, as tissues or cells never express simultaneously all human genes. Furthermore, important abundant transcripts encoded by multi copy genes or accompanied by pseudogenes are difficult to evaluate by genomic DNA sequencing yet are readily captured at the RNA level.  

The Tuschl laboratory has developed RNA sequencing (RNAseq) approaches over many years and has discovered the genes encoding miRNAs and piRNAs. The group has revisited all classes of RNAs, including mRNAs, in order to arrive at a cleanly annotated and minimally redundant human transcriptome, including normal and disease-causing allelic variation, RNA editing sites, and isoforms. The emerging reference transcriptome is integrated in a large prototype database able to hold large experimental RNAseq data setsin order to supporting hierarchical annotation processes adaptable to any size of input RNA. This platform is able to generate in-depth reports of RNAabundance, specificity of expression across samples, detailed alignment reports and HTML displays, searching of reads and transcripts, and manually curating reference transcript entries. RNA reads without retrievable annotation are returned in form of assembled contigs to allow for discovery of novel genomic rearrangements, pathogens, or genes searching in public databases. Current software tools for alignment and mapping are fairly complicated and can only beused by domain experts, while they still miss to explain a substantial portion of RNAseq data. Yet recently, the Tuschl lab has developed automated approaches for isolating extracellular RNA from plasma/serum and urine samples and studied the small RNA composition by RNAseq in nearly 1,000 samples of normal subjectsand patients including liver, heart, and kidney diseases. The experimental as well as analytical challenges will be reviewed.

For more information go to https://oir.nih.gov/wals

Immunology Interest Group

Dr. Murphy is an authority on immunoregulation by chemokines and related leukocyte chemoattractants. His basic research discoveries include the first leukocyte chemoattractant receptors, including the HIV coreceptor CCR5; the HIV restriction factor CCR5D32; the first virally encoded chemokine receptors; and the role of CCR5 in West Nile virus pathogenesis. Dr. Murphy has received numerous patents and awards, including the NIAID Mentor of the Year Award, the NIH Director？？？s Award (twice), the Pillars of Immunology Award from the Journal of Immunology, and both the Dolph Adams Award and Marie Bonazinga Award from the Society of Leukocyte Biology. Several of his papers have been selected as Classics by Science magazine. In addition, he has been elected to the Association of American Physicians, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Society of Microbiology, the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and the Henry Kunkel Society. More recently, Dr. Murphy has initiated a clinical research program focused on WHIM syndrome, a rare congenital immunodeficiency disorder caused by gain-of-function mutations in the C-tail of the chemokine receptor CXCR4 and characterized by warts, hypogammaglobulinemia, infections, and myelokathexis (neutropenia due to impaired egress from the bone marrow). His laboratory is currently developing treatment and cure strategies for patients with WHIM syndrome. Besides his scientific accomplishments, Dr. Murphy has been a valued mentor to several trainees who are now independent investigators intramurally as well as outside the NIH in the US and internationally. His lecture title today is ？？？WHIM Syndrome Immunodeficiency: the Trail from Tails to Tales.？？？ Please join us for this exciting seminar!