Looking for something interesting to listen to on your way to or from work? Dr. James Broach, Director of the Penn State Institute for Personalized Medicine was featured on the mendelspod podcast.

Host Theral Timpson asked Dr. Broach to discuss his use of new technologies like Bionano Genomics’ optical maps to answer the question, why does cancer arise, and how do we treat it? They also discussed how important structural variation will be in cancer diagnosis.  How sequencing is necessary, but not sufficient for studying large SV. How quickly could optical mapping replace traditional karyotyping and is it already a cost effective substitute?

Researchers like Dr. Broach use Bionano genome mapping to move beyond short-read technology bottlenecks to better interrogate the whole genome.