On Friday, April 26, 2019 GCB hosted the inaugural International Training Group (IRTG) Symposium. The “Dissecting and Reengineering the Regulatory Genome” IRTG was formed through a collaboration with the Duke Center for Genomic and Computational Biology (GCB) and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HUB) and is comprised of experts in a variety of genomic disciplines and career stages from 11 research groups in four institutions in Berlin: HUB, Charite Medical School, Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine and Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics.
The weekend’s activities included an all-day public symposium on Friday in which faculty from the four institutions in Berlin presented their research. Saturday and Sunday were limited to program faculty and graduate students. A poster session was also held over the weekend for graduate students.
Director of GCB and spokesperson for Duke University IRTG Grey Wray, Ph.D., and professor and spokesperson for HUB Uwe Ohler, Ph.D., along with seven guest speakers hosted 113
Attendees during Friday’s symposium. Students were able to hear from speakers about the following topics:
- Predicting enhancers from chromatin marks
- Long-range gene regulation in dopaminergic neurons of the murine midbrain
- Transcription factors defining cell identities in plants
- Regulatory networks underlying X-dosage sensing during X-inactivation and stem cell differentiation
- Establishing cell identities in neurogenesis in the fruit fly embryo
- Interpretation of human genetic variation across the genome
- The regulatory landscape of mammalian sex determination
- Decoding gene regulatory elements from time-course and single-cell chromatin data
“We were delighted to host our colleagues from Berlin and to hear about the exciting research they are carrying out,” Wray said. “This program provides an exciting opportunity for graduate students from Duke to expand their technical expertise by working closely with a lab in Berlin that is doing cutting-edge research that complements their own projects.”