Wayne State University School of Medicine faculty member Leonard Lipovich, Ph.D., has been selected to present his work on long non-coding ribonucleic acids at the Gordon Conference on Human Genetics and Genomics, set for July 7-12 at Bryant University, Smithfield, R.I.
The competitive conference is held every two years, and attendance is limited to those at the emerging forefront of their fields.
Dr. Lipovich is an associate professor in WSU's Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics and the Department of Neurology. He will present a talk titled "Primate-specific long non-coding RNA genes regulate cellular states in human disease" July 11, during a session on genetics and therapeutics. His abstract was competitively selected for an oral presentation.
The Gordon Conference will bring together international leaders in the field of human genetics and genomics to discuss what has been learned and where the field is heading. Dr. Lipovich will join speakers from Yale University, Harvard Medical School, the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Oxford, England, and others, who will focus on advances in studying the organization and function of the genome, including non-coding regions, new insights into human genetic diversity and a case studies of sequencing approaches applied to both rare and common diseases.
The Gordon Research Conferences promote discussions and the free exchange of ideas at the research frontiers of the biological, chemical and physical sciences. Scientists with common professional interests come together for a week of intense discussion and examination of the most advanced aspects of their field. The conferences were initiated by Dr. Neil E. Gordon, of Johns Hopkins University, who recognized in the late 1920s the difficulty in establishing good, direct communication between scientists, whether working in the same subject area or in interdisciplinary research.
Since 2011, Dr. Lipovich has been a member of the National Institutes of Health's ENCODE Consortium, the major research follow-up to the historic Human Genome Project. ENCODE, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements Consortium, is constructing a comprehensive catalog of all functional elements in the human genome, including those that control the expression of genetic information in human cells. The project's goal is to provide the scientific community with information needed to better understand the role that the genome plays in health and disease.