Welcome to the Roth lab in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, where we're passionate about biology, foosball and coffee. Broadly, I do computational genome analysis involving ultraconservation, copy-number variants, alternative splicing, SNPs, etc., centered on human but including relatives.
Publications
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Isoform discovery using targeted cloning, "deep well" pooling, and parallel sequencing. K Salehi-Ashtiani, X Yang, A Derti, W Tian, T Hao, C Lin, K Makowski, L Shen, RR Murray, D Szeto, N Tusneem, DR Smith, ME Cusick, DE Hill, FP Roth, M Vidal. Nature Methods (2008). PDFSupplement.
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My thesis: Mammalian Ultraconserved Sequences Avoid Segmental Duplications And Copy-Number Variants. Boston University, 2007 (defended May 2006). Excerpts coming soon.
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Chapter 12: Beyond Sequence Similarity, or Sequence Analysis in the Age of the Genome. Itai Yanai, Adnan Derti and Charles De Lisi. In Genomic technologies : present and future, edited by David Galas and Stephen McCormack. From the review by Paul Dear: "The final chapter, by Yanai, Derti and De Lisi, was one of my favourites (sic)."
I wonder...
... whether "postdoctoral" makes as much sense as "post-genomic".
... whether "recursive splicing" should be "iterative splicing".
... whether surveillance of splicing exists.
"I was still discouraged, though, about having to go to MIT, which seemed so grubby compared with the Ivy League. I thought of killing myself (at the age of eighteen) but soon decided that I could always try MIT and then kill myself later if it was that bad, but that I couldn't commit suicide and try MIT afterward. The two operations didn't commute, as we say in math and physics jargon. When I got to MIT, I discovered that it was actually a very pleasant place..." - Murray Gell-Mann, 1969 Nobel Laureate in Physics
A quote that applies to scientific thought: "The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment." -Bertrand Russell
Charlie Rose asks John McEnroe whether any of his kids have "tennis ability". McEnroe: "What time is this (show) on tonight?" Rose: "11 o'clock." McEnroe: "Not really."
"Put a plant out there to say you are female-friendly." Marketing consultant Delia Passi, to Harley-Davidson dealers, on how to sell to women (NYT, July 25, 2007).
"I've seen the miracles of God with my own eyes. I did a lot of bluffing also." - Psychologist Jerry Yang, upon winning the 2007 World Series of Poker.
"That's when I believe statistics, when it's Grandma-verified statistics." - Hans Rosling
"But I have to get serious, and how do you get serious? You make a Powerpoint [presentation]." - Hans Rosling
"Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute." - Cicero
"I rather hate the idea of writing for priority, yet I certainly shd. be vexed if any one (sic) were to publish my doctrines before me." Darwin to Charles Lyell, who had urged him to publish his work on evolution, in 1856.
"Your words have come true with a vengeance that I should be forestalled." Darwin to Lyell in 1858, after receiving a letter from Alfred Russell Wallace
"I hope it is a satisfaction to you to reflect - and very few things in my life have been more satisfactory to me - that we have never felt any jealousy towards each other, though in one sense rivals". Darwin to Wallace, 10 years later
"Retirement to me is a synonym for decay. The idea of just knocking about, playing golf or whatever, is so unattractive to me that I would rather be nibbled to death by ducks." - The late Jack Valenti
"I'm interested in this research because it might do the world some good, but also for its own sake. Whenever you find something that has never been understood before, that's a wonderful feeling. It's what everyone I know in science lives for." - David Clapham, NYT, 01/2007
"Teleost fishes, with about 25,000 extant species, are the largest group of vertebrates and exhibit vast diversity in their morphology and adaptations. The accelerated rate of evolution of regulatory regions may be an important factor in the[ir] rapid radiation and diversity..."Venkatesh et al. Science 22 December 2006: Vol. 314. no. 5807, p. 1892
From an NYT article about Daniel Dennett (note the missing major & minor grooves):
Things you'll never hear me say:
- (ir)relevancy
- hesitancy
- a whole nother
- nature vs. nurture
- survival of the fittest
- at the end of the day
- different than
- as best (as)
- 'acronym' for an abbreviation not pronounced as a word
- irregardless
- co-equal
- it is what it is
- (plural subject) (singular verb)
- I think we have enough data
Character study:
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hms'harvard'edu
