(300b) Chemical Engineering Principles In The Paradigm Of Genomics

The human genome contains a large number of polymorphic regions that are currently the primary subject of many genomics studies aiming to understand gene function and regulation. While these studies hold the promise of discovering the molecular basis of disease and the development of new therapeutics and diagnostic tools, they are limited by several technical aspects such as accuracy, speed and cost-effectiveness. Efforts to overcome such technical limitations have been made largely through the application of various chemical engineering principles including reaction kinetics, thermodynamics, and mass transfer. Here, as an example, I will present a high throughput system that has been developed based on chemical engineering principles for efficient analysis of DNA by mass spectrometry, and its applications in large scale genomics studies.