The podcast team grew organically at ATCC as Brian Shapiro, PhD, and executive producer of the podcast, found Dave Yarmosh and Ford Combs, PhD, ATCC bioinformatician, and sound engineer. “As an avid podcast listener, I was excited by the idea of an ATCC podcast because of the organization’s position of leadership and breadth of work. Once I found out that Dave and Brian had a similar idea, it was just a matter of time,” says Combs. ”The podcast is a natural extension of our successful webinar series. We’ve been able to leverage the lessons learned from webinar production and applied them to our podcast," adds Shapiro.
Each podcast episode reveals the scientist’s journey to this moment in their careers and where their research is headed. Jonathan L. Jacobs, PhD, shares the circuitous path that shaped him into the bioinformatician and thought leader he is today. He discusses data provenance, genomics, and the intrinsic value of bioinformatics in science and research.
Drs. Heather Branscome of ATCC and Fatah Kashanchi, a professor at George Mason University, discuss their research in extracellular vesicles, including exosomes. They discuss their collaboration and connect the dots to understand the intersection of extracellular vesicles, virally infected cells, and cancer research. This research is emerging as an area of interest for scientists in academia and biopharma.
In the season’s final episodes, John Bagnoli, senior manager of bioinformatics at ATCC explains his path from a career in robotics, with a stop in West Africa during the Ebola epidemic and shares the challenges of doing lab work in a shipping container. He discusses the future of bioinformatics and the difficulties of computational automation.
What’s Next
The episodes in Season 2 are in pre-production and will focus on the need for next-generation sequencing standards in several disciplines. We will dig into standards in microbial forensics that help to undercover the genesis of epidemics, look into microbiome standards and probiotic products, and discuss ATCC’s partnerships with other standards organizations.
Podcast resources and research tools
Podcast
Episode 1: The Difficulties of Big Data in the Biological Sciences
Learn about issues such as reproducibility in research, the pros and cons of crowd sourcing data, and a solution in ATCC’s approach to whole-genome sequencing, assembly, and annotation for producing high-quality, authenticated reference genomes
More
Podcast
Episode 4: Approaching the Frontier of Regenerative Medicine
Tune in to learn about extracellular vesicles and how they can play opposing roles in the pathogenesis of infectious diseases and the regeneration of damaged tissues.
More
Podcast
Episode 7: Slow Evolution and Fast Revelations in Bioinformatics
Listen in to learn about the importance of correctly interrogating big data sources and the importance of bioinformatics standards and reveals some of their surprising origins.
More
Poster
Translational Ramifications of Crowd-sourced Genomics Data
This is a poster presented at LAMG 2022 that explores the importance of of high-quality, curated reference data.
More
Poster
The ATCC Genome Portal – An Updated Resource for Authenticated Microbial Reference Genomes
This is a poster presented at ASM Microbe 2022 that explores the generation of high-quality, curated reference data.
More
Presentation
Large-scale Manufacturing and Functional Assessment of Extracellular Vesicles
This is a talk presented at the American Exosome and RNA Conference that demonstrates a method for the isolation of high-quality EVs from large-scale batches.
More
