MBL Friday Evening Lecture Series: Julia Zeitlinger, Stowers Institute for Medical Research

“Deciphering the Cis-regulatory Code of Development with Deep Learning”

There has been a revolution in genomics technology, leading to an

exponential growth of multi-modal genomics data in different organisms

across developmental time and space. After decades of focusing on the

mechanisms underlying gene expression, I argue that it is now time to

come back to a concept that has its origins before the rise of molecular

biology and biochemistry: the understanding that biology has a DNA

sequence basis. With the development of neural networks that predict

genomics data from sequence, learning how gene regulation is encoded in

DNA is now a feasible goal. This paradigm shift has the long-term goal

of deciphering this cis-regulatory code during development, uncovering

the regulatory information relevant to human health, and building more

generalizable models applicable to any biological system