Listen to the Third EUSci Seminar!
February 19th, 2010 Posted in SeminarThanks to the efforts of our resident audio engineer Alan Boyd, we have a recording of the third EUSci seminar for your listening pleasure. If you were unable to attend in person and wonder what you were missing, then hurry up and download it already!
Note: This file is in AAC format to allow for chapter navigation between the talks (from the Controls menu if you’re using iTunes). If your MP3 player won’t play AAC, try it in iTunes!
Apologies for the noise at the beginning, we did get the noisy people to leave eventually!
Speakers:
Szu-Han Wang – Can we tune-down fearful memories?
Memories play a crucial role in our daily function. While memories are generally beneficial, they can be maladaptive if we are haunted by aversive memories (e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder). Can we find solutions to bring fearful memories in control? Recent research advances suggest so. It has been shown that the brain engaged a plastic change not only during establishment of new memory but also during the reactivation of the memory, which implies a memory ‘reconsolidation’ process. This provides a time window for certain behaviour or pharmacological treatments to be effective. Recent exciting findings from Nature and Science will be discussed.
Jonathan Manning – Sequencing beyond genomes
The world of DNA sequencing has moved on significantly since the widely trumpeted completion of the the human genome in 2003, following the first draft in 2001. Thanks to a new set of ‘next generation’ sequencing technologies, a human genome can now be sequenced in a matter of weeks at a fraction of the cost of more traditional sequencing methods. Aiming at a general science audience, this short talk will briefly cover how these phenomenal improvements have been achieved, some new problems that have been created along the way, and the real-world ramifications. Since a genome is really only a set of blueprints, we’ll also be exploring ‘transcriptomics’, by which we determine which of those blueprints are actually used in particular tissue, as well as some other fascinating applications.
