Topic: deep sequencing

Develop high-throughput methods to measure how protein interactions respond to mechanical force. The project combines protein engineering, yeast surface display, directed evolution, deep sequencing and single-molecule force measurements, with machine-learning models trained on the resulting data. Initial applications study interactions involved in blood clotting and von Willebrand disease. This salaried doctoral appointment spans experimental and computational work at ETH Zurich and the University of Basel, with teaching and publication duties.

The ability to read the DNA sequences of different organisms has transformed biology in much the same way that the telescope transformed astronomy. And yet, much of the sequence found in these genomes is as enigmatic as the Rosetta Stone was to early Egyptologists. With the aim of making steps to crack the genomic Rosetta Stone, I will describe unexpected ways of using the physics of information transfer first developed at Bell Labs for thinking about telephone communications to try to decipher the meaning of the regulatory features of genomes. Specifically, I will show how we have been able