Dr. Will Gilbert

Feats of Bioinfomagic

By Barbara Gibson

Dr. Will Gilbert likes to carry the human genome around on his iPod. It’s the easiest way, he says, to transfer the genome — 3 billion chemical “letters” that make up a person’s genetic code, or DNA — to the computers of other researchers at the Hubbard Center for Genome Studies at the University of New Hampshire.

Gilbert had set up a research project involving the human genome on his Power Mac, using the Apple/Genentech version of BLAST. A breakthrough implementation of the popular bioinformatics tool from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), A/G BLAST conducts high-speed DNA searches in biomedical research and drug discovery. “But,” says Gilbert, “I wanted to run the project down the hall on another Mac. Rather than copy it across the network, I’d pull out my iPod. Plug it in, drag, drop, zip, boom, bang and walk it down the hall.”

Cracking the Code

As former director of computing at MIT’s prestigious Whitehead Institute, Gilbert created computer facilities so advanced that they served as models for both academia and industry. At the Hubbard Center, he pursues the nascent field of bioinformatics — making data from genomics and biotechnology research more accessible to scientists.

“I’d pull out my iPod. Plug it in, drag, drop, zip, boom, bang and walk it down the hall.”

“We’re the post-genomic era,” Gilbert explains. “Scientists have already cracked the code of the human genome,” the genetic book of life that contains instructions for building and running a human body. “So we’re closer to understanding what makes us who we are. We also have pretty big chunks of genomes from fairly closely-related organisms, and we’re just beginning to look at rice, pig, cow and chimpanzee. We need a way to line those up and to compare them. A/G BLAST is the just the ticket.”

At the Hubbard Center, Gilbert’s group used A/G BLAST hoping to identify areas of the human genome that contain genes unique to humans — for example, the gene for hairlessness, or the gene that provides the recipe for neurological development, or the gene that confers resistance to tuberculosis. Some of these genes influence not only what we look like, but also our biological functions, susceptibility to illnesses and behavioral patterns. One human gene produces a layer of subcutaneous fat — a characteristic that allowed us to migrate from subtropical climates into the colder regions of Northern Europe.

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