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ӳý of MIT and Harvard is collaborating with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudera, Google, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft to enable cloud-based access to its Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK) software package. Through these collaborations the GATK Best Practices pipeline will be available to users of cloud service providers through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) mechanism, expanding access beyond traditional desktop solutions. ӳý will also work with collaborators to drive the creation of the next generation of GATK based on the Apache SparkTM computing framework.

Feng Zhang, a core institute member of the ӳý, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and W. M. Keck Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, has been named a recipient of the 2016 Canada Gairdner International Award — Canada’s most prestigious scientific prize — for his role in developing the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system.

led by Francisco Quintana of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the ӳý used zebrafish as a model to examine T-cell receptors (TCRs) and their response to foreign and native antigens. The team found that a general pool of “public” TCRs capable of dealing with diverse antigen threats dominate the T-cell response in zebrafish. It’s possible that these TCR “first-responders” buy time, giving the immune system a short window during which it can develop more specialized, “private” TCRs.