When you have a good thing going you often want it to last forever, but we know that can never happen. Life and the world around us are fluid, dynamic, and we’re always finding the balance of fighting or harnessing entropy and inevitable change.

As we encounter unexpected changes, we see them as chances to evaluate the foundations of our podcast's success while finding opportunities to evolve it and make it even better.

Join us for a reflection of where we are, how we got here, and a sneak preview at what’s to come. We’re here to assure you, evolution is a good thing!

The fields of Cell and gene therapy are booming and poised to change the treatment and prevention of disease. These research areas require the transfer of genetic material to cells, and viral vectors are commonly used here. Specifically, adeno-associated virus (AAV) and lentiviral vectors (LVV) are vectors of choice.

We’re joined for this episode by MinGin Kim and Kimberly Gomez, both scientists at Thermo Fisher. With backgrounds and expertise in the areas of cell and gene therapy, they help explain what all the excitement is about and how AAV and LVV are used. We hear about some of the challenges associated with viral vector work and get to hear about how digital PCR (dPCR) and good assay design are helping overcome many of these challenges to enable research and the biopharmaceutical industry. As you might expect from Absolute Gene-ius, you also get to hear their respective career path journeys and some really interesting lab stories.

Visit the Absolute Gene-ius page to learn more about the guests, the hosts, and the Applied Biosystems QuantStudio Absolute Q Digital PCR System.

Organ transplantation is a modern marvel, with more than 157,000 solid organ, and more than 9,000 marrow and blood transplants occurring worldwide in 2022. Organ donor and recipient matching and compatibility screening has progressed significantly in recent decades as molecular methods have progressed rapidly to support this and other fields. Specifically, typing of human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) has expanded to consider ethnic population variation and cell free DNA (cfDNA) monitoring is now being used to monitor recipients for biomarkers that indicate organ rejection.

Our guest for this episode, Dr. Lee Ann Baxter-Lowe, Director of the HLA Laboratory at Children's Hospital Los Angeles has been working in the field of transplantation science for virtually her entire career. Join us for a great explanation of the science and a first-hand recounting of developing the assays, from decades ago, before thermal cyclers existed, to her cutting-edge work using digital PCR to progress the field even further.

Lee Ann also shares very personal aspects of her career journey in her conversation with Cassie. This includes her describing the scientific “studies” of her and her cousin as children, her venturing into the world of HLA typing when it was emerging, and the role her family has played in her career, which gets personal quickly when she shares that her husband is currently dealing with a blood malignancy.

Visit the Absolute Gene-ius page to learn more about the guests, the hosts, and the Applied Biosystems QuantStudio Absolute Q Digital PCR System. 

Before the 1990s, small bits of RNA were considered junk by most, but the 1993 discovery of microRNA (miRNAs) began to reveal that bits of only 19-24 nucleotides of RNA can have an important gene regulation function in cells. Since their discovery, there has been a flurry of work to catalog known miRNAs and understand their functions, which include being tied to specific disease states such as leukemia.

According to our guest, Dr. Guy Novotny, Molecular Biologist at Herlev Hospital in Copenhagen, it’s now relatively easy to identify a miRNAs and follow their expression, but to figure out what they’re actually doing is a real challenge. We hear how he and his team have recently adopted digital PCR, and the benefits that come with it, to study microRNAs and figure out what proteins they’re regulating the expression of. This includes basic research, where Guy is “adding to the big pile of data that’s existing out there,” and he also does clinical research that has a closer connection to specific disease states and subject outcomes. As always, you’ll get to learn about his career journey and learn that there’s really not much that cake cannot fix.

Visit the Absolute Gene-ius page to learn more about the guests, the hosts, and the Applied Biosystems QuantStudio Absolute Q Digital PCR System. 

Designing a successful PCR assay is all about selecting the right primers to deliver the sensitivity and selectivity for which PCR is known for. But anyone that’s designed an assay themselves will know that doing so successfully is a lot harder it sounds.

We’re joined by two PCR assay design pros for this episode. Kimi Soohoo Ong, and Dr. Rounak Feigelman, both from Thermo Fisher Scientific, shine a light on the many factors that must be considered to design a winning PCR assay. From the level of fragmentation of nucleic acids in the sample, to what other species’ genomes that may be present in the sample, to what the sample matrix may contain, to the PCR master mix being used, if multiplexing is required, to what assay controls will be, and more! These two practiced bioinformaticians cover these challenges and then tell us how their team overcomes challenges to develop winning assays for both qPCR and dPCR applications. Our conversation uncovers the level of skill and artistry that goes into this craft.

As always, you get to learn a bit more about our guests’ backgrounds and career paths in the Cassie’s Career Corner portion of the interview. They share how they both chose a bioinformatics path over wet lab work, while also acknowledging how important the wet lab work is to what they do. They also share some great advice and resources for anyone looking to explore a career in bioinformatics.

Visit the Absolute Gene-ius page to learn more about the guests, the hosts, and the Applied Biosystems QuantStudio Absolute Q Digital PCR System. 

Blood is a symbol of life, which makes sense given that it plays such an important role in so many body functions, including our immune system. Blood makes up approximately 8% of your normal body weight and unfortunately, cancers of the blood, including lymphoma and leukemia, account for ~10% of all diagnosed cancers in the U.S. each year.  

CAR-T cell therapy has emerged as a promising method to engineer a subject’s own immune cells to fight bloodborne cancer. Our guest for this episode, Raquel Munoz from the Hospital Universitario Virgen del Rocío in Seville Spain, is doing research in this exciting CAR-T cell therapy space. Specifically, she is working to develop methods to help better quantify and understand the expansion of CAR-T cells in the body to help monitor treatment and predict outcomes.  We learn about why digital PCR was selected for her work and how it’s helped raise confidence in the results they’re getting. We even hear about how she believes this treatment will find success in treating solid tumor cancers.

In Cassie’s career corner, we learn how Raquel found her career path and love of immunology and working in a hospital setting. Raquel also shares some great career advice, stories of lab mishaps, and the dangerous hobby that she says is some of the only time she’s not thinking about work or problems.

 Visit the Absolute Gene-ius page to learn more about the guests, the hosts, and the Applied Biosystems QuantStudio Absolute Q Digital PCR System. 

We are all the product of a reproductive process, yet reproductive biology, or the study of the processes and mechanisms involved in reproduction, is not well understood. Deepening our understanding of reproductive biology is crucial to advancing assistive reproductive technologies (ART) and advancing our collective comprehension of inheritance and evolution. 

Our guests for this episode are a couple, and we mean a literal married couple, of reproductive biology experts. Dr. Pavla Brachova and Dr. Nehemiah Alvarez, both working in the Eastern Virginia Medical School’s Department of Physiological Sciences. In their collaborative work they aim to better understand and characterize the role of RNA and cellular events that impact ovarian function in women. We learn about their work with oocytes, which are single cells that grow and mature within the ovary and once fertilized provide the foundations of an embryo capable of maturing to a new individual. They outline how they use digital PCR (dPCR) and other methods to monitor RNA regulation in single cells and how progressing this work and lead to potential RNA-based therapies. 

In Cassie’s career corner we hear childhood stories from each guest and learn about their respective career paths, which eventually collided and merged. They share insights on the importance of having mentors experienced in your field, the challenges of shared job searching, and the joys of collaborating as a couple with shared scientific interests.

Visit the Absolute Gene-ius page to learn more about the guests, the hosts, and the Applied Biosystems QuantStudio Absolute Q Digital PCR System. 

Welcome back Gene-iuses!  Jordan and Cassie kick us off with a fun teaser of what’s to come in Season 2 of the Absolute Gene-ius series.  

 We’ll be featuring another great season of interesting guests, all using dPCR to progress their diverse research applications. This includes conversations about reproductive biology, liquid biopsy and transplantation research, CAR-T research, the role of bioinformatics in PCR assay design, micro-RNA analysis, differential gene expression analysis, and of course Cassie’s Career Corner, where we get to learn about people behind the science.  

 This teaser, like every episode of Absolute Gene-ius, has the fun baked in to keep it all light and interesting too.  You might even hear some digital PCR jokes! 

 Visit the Absolute Gene-ius page to access the entire first season and to learn more about the hosts and the Applied Biosystems QuantStudio Absolute Q Digital PCR System.