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For core faculty member Feng Zhang’s lab, nature offers up the raw ingredients needed to control brain cells and understand the brain’s wiring. Since joining the ӳý and McGovern Institute for Brain Research in 2011, Zhang has recruited neuroscientists, engineers, computer scientists, and others from diverse backgrounds who are interested in developing and optimizing the tools needed to understand the brain. The researchers have turned to bacteria for proteins that can be engineered to bind to precise locations in the genome, and to plants and algae for proteins that are activated by light. Now, Zhang’s research team has brought discoveries from both areas of study together to create an expansive toolset for precisely controlling and testing the function of genes and other genetic influences in the brain.

Midsummer Nights’ Science continues next week with the “Unweaving the circuitry of human disease,” the third lecture in this year’s series. ӳý associate member Manolis Kellis will be speaking at the July 24 event, discussing current efforts to build high-resolution activity maps of gene and regulatory regions across hundreds of cell types. These maps are bringing the genome to life, revealing possible culprits in human disease, and exposing the circuitry likely responsible when the genome’s regulatory system goes wrong.

Update July 18: Check out a of the live tweets from this event.

In the second 2013 installment of Midsummer Night’s Science, our annual public lecture series, medical oncologist and ӳý associate member Levi Garraway will explore how genomic technology is helping to reveal cancer’s long-held secrets, and the many ways those findings, both the expected and unexpected, are changing the lives of patients.

Midsummer Nights’ Science has become an annual tradition at the ӳý, and this year our first lecture in the series offers something extra special: a panel discussion featuring several luminaries from the world of chemical biology and drug discovery. This is the first panel discussion in the history of the series and promises to be a thought-provoking conversation about drug discovery and how we might mitigate suffering from disease in the future.