Science AMA Series: I’m Manolis Kellis, a professor of computer science at MIT studying the human genome to learn about what causes obesity, Alzheimer’s, cancer and other conditions. AMA about comp-bio and epigenomics, and how they impact human health!

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Hello Reddit!

Hello Reddit! My name’s Manolis Kellis, and I’m a professor at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), where I lead the Computational Biology group, and am also a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

I study the human genome and its supremely underrated cousin, the human epigenome.

Basically, your genome is the DNA you’re born with (“the book of life”). Your genes are the same in all your cells, but they play very different functions thanks to your epigenome, which highlights the parts of the genome that are important in each of your cell types.

Last year, a decade after the human genome was sequenced, I was part of the team that helped create the most comprehensive map of the epigenome, as part of the Roadmap Epigenomics and ENCODE consortium.

By studying these maps, our team has helped figure out the control switches that turn your genes on and off in different cell types. The locations and activity of those switches have helped us gain insights about many diseases, including Alzheimer’s and obesity.

Our results are sometimes challenging the way we see common disorders. For example, we found that genetic variants contributing to Alzheimer’s act through immune processes, rather than neuronal processes. For obesity, we found that the strongest genetic association acts via a master switch controlling energy storage vs. energy dissipation in our fat cells, rather than through the control of appetite in the brain.

We hope that these insights will pave the way for new therapeutics. For example, we showed that we can manipulate the obesity switch we uncovered in human cells and in mice, to switch human fat-storing cells into fat-burning cells, and to boost the metabolism of mice, causing them to lose 50% of their fat mass with no change in exercise or appetite.

In addition to disease genomics, my group works on comparative genomics, microRNAs, biological networks, flies, non-coding RNAs, and genome evolution. You can explore our papers from these and other areas in our interactive research page, and check out some related news stories, or watch video lectures describing our work, including my TEDx talk on the genomic revolution.

I also teach two courses on computational biology that you may find interesting. Computational Biology: Genomes, Networks, Evolution provides a broad introduction to the field. Computational Personal Genomics surveys recent papers in human genetics and genomics. You can find both of these courses online, and I encourage you to explore many related classes through MIT’s Open CourseWare.

A bit about me: I was born and raised in Greece, moved to France and then New York as a teenager, and got both my Bachelor’s and Ph.D. degrees from MIT. I worked on computational geometry, robotics, and artificial intelligence at MIT and at Xerox PARC, before seeing the light and joining the genomic revolution.

Feel free to ask me about anything, including:

• what MIT, CSAIL, and the Broad Institute are like

• the best islands to visit on your next trip to Greece

• why genetics is so important to the pharmaceutical industry

• why I got into computer science and/or genomics

• how human evolution is shaping common and rare variants in human disease

• what I do when I’m not studying the human genome

I’ll be back online at 1 p.m. EST to answer your questions!

DISCLAIMER: I am not an official spokesperson for CSAIL, MIT, the Broad, or anybody else but me.

">Science AMA Series: I’m Manolis Kellis, a professor of computer science at MIT studying the human genome to learn about what causes obesity, Alzheimer’s, cancer and other conditions. AMA about comp-bio and epigenomics, and how they impact human health!