The Gene Expression & Metabolism Group: Uncovering the Causal Molecular Etiology Underlying Complex Diseases
Every human genome contains an ordered series of roughly 3 billion chemical letters, or “nucleotides”, which make up our DNA. Across all of humankind, there are a few tens of millions of variants in the DNA which are drive all inherited differences between individuals. A few of our characteristics (or “phenotypes”) are determined purely by those inherited genetic differences, such as eye color. However, nearly all phenotypes occur as a result of inborn genetic predisposition and environmental factors: hair color (affected by sun exposure, age, and hair dye), body weight (affected by diet and exercise), height (affected by childhood nutrition), and so forth. My research question is focused on this “gene-environment interaction”; essentially, how can we identify which genetic differences cause people to have diverging outcomes to the same treatment? To identify these factors, our laboratory looks beyond DNA (simply a genetic “blueprint”) to the classes of chemicals of which are directly active: mRNA, protein, and metabolites. Unlike DNA, these molecules radically change in abundance depending on the function and immediate needs of every cell and organ in our body. Measuring these variable molecular intermediaries allows us to nearly-instantaneously judge the effect of a treatment (e.g. a drug, or a lifestyle change), without the need to wait months or years to observe a change in body weight, or the size of a tumor. My scientific contributions have been to develop technologies which more accurately measure these chemical intermediaries, along with the software and approaches to link them to predicted outcomes. These developments, along with others in the field of systems biomedicine, are beginning to revolutionize and accelerate not only our pace of medical discovery, but also our capacity to tailor medical interventions to the precise needs of the individual.
About the Speaker
Associate Prof. Williams joined the University of Luxembourg as part of the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) in the summer of 2020 as an associate professor, establishing his research group “Gene Expression & Metabolism”. Before coming to Luxembourg, he was a staff scientist at the ETH Zürich as part of the mass spectrometry proteomics team of Prof. Ruedi Aebersold, and he obtained his doctoral degree at the EPFL in the laboratory of Prof. Johan Auwerx, studying how genetic and environmental factors influence the mitochondria in metabolic diseases. The laboratory’s main research goals are developing both wetlab and computational methods for measuring and merging diverse “multiomics” datasets (e.g. RNA, protein, metabolites) to better understand the molecular chains that lead from a specific independent variable (e.g. a DNA variant or a dietary change) to a subsequent disease (e.g. diabetes, cardiovascular disease).
The event starts at 11:00 followed by a light lunch
Registration: Register via Eventbrite until June 13.
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