Two of the latest hot topics in lthe life sciences come together  in one workshop on Friday in the Calgary Technologies building where Genome Alberta calls home. Epigenetics is obviously a hot topic these days because it did after all make the cover of Time Magazine earlier this year. Personalized medicine makes its way into everything from government health care debates to the MIT Tecnhology Review. We're bringing together some pretty good people in the field as a first step in an epigenetics network in Alberta with the ultimate objective of building a complete epigenetics research strategy.

Epigenetics is the study of changes in appearance or gene expression caused by factors other than changes to the underlying DNA in an organism. As the Time Magazine article pointed out , it kind of messes with what many of us thought we had learned about nature and nurture. New research however says there are changes that can happen and be passed down through generations.

Here is the agenda for the morning:




  9:00a        Welcome and Introductions   (Bob Church)
  9:05a        Genome Alberta's Role   (David Bailey)
  9:20a        Personalized Medicine - It's Role in Alberta    (Marvin Fritzler)
  9:40a        A Computational Environment for the Characterization of Epigenetic Phenomena   (Christoph Sensen)

  10:00a      Break

  10:20a      Molecular Biomarkers in Personalized Medicine: A Public Health Perspective   (Alaa Badawi)
  10:40a      Circulating Nucelic Acids as Biomarkers in Disease Detection and Treartment in Animals and Humans      (Howard  Urnovitz)
  11:00a      Maternal and Child Health Genomics Initiative for Alberta and Canada   (Brent Scott)
  11:20a      Next Steps (Ted Bilyea)

We'll bring you more from the workshop and more about epigenetics in general over the coming months. I'll be at the workshop and will post some tweets as the morning goes on, as well as some pictures on our Picasa site and some more blog posts. 
In the meantime here is Genome Alberta CEO David Bailey giving a quick explanation of epigenetics: