Q&A: Istvan Albert on Penn State’s Efforts to Equip Biomedical Researchers to Use Bioinformatics Tools

Michael Stitzel joked that his research has led him to climb up the evolutionary tree. As an undergraduate he worked with yeast, and over the years, he has worked his way up to studying Drosophila, C. elegans, and, now, people.

Stitzel shifted from the more basic roots of the tree to the biomedical limbs as a matter of motivation. He said that as a graduate student, though he worked on an important and interesting question, when experiments didn't go well, it was hard for him to get motivated. And so, he found himself drawn to questions with more direct relevance to medicine.

He turned to studying type 2 diabetes. Using a genome-wide association study approach, he identified a number of regions in the genome linked to the disease, but many of them were, as he put it, "in the middle of nowhere." This led him to thinking about epigenetics, and then to later uncover what he and his colleagues dubbed 'stretch enhancers,' longer-than-average enhancers that appear to be driving physiological functions.

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Q&A: Istvan Albert on Penn State's Efforts to Equip Biomedical Researchers to Use Bioinformatics Tools