Professor Catherine Reinke will kick off the Linfield College faculty lecture series when she discusses the study of genetics in the age of whole-genome sequencing Wednesday, Sept. 16, at 7 p.m. in 201 Riley Hall at Linfield.
Reinke, assistant professor of biology, will present “From Observers to Participants: Building the scientific community through independent and course-based research in genetics.”
How do organisms use their genetic information to carry out essential life processes and generate the diversity of form that we observe? Or put another way, what do genes do and how do they do it? The talk will describe Reinke’s genetics research in model organisms, including plants, yeast and insects over the past 20 years. Many aspects of this work continue with undergraduates in her laboratory at Linfield.
Rapid advances in genetics research are allowing geneticists to ask new types of experimental questions using protocols such as RNA-seq and whole-genome analysis. Reinke will introduce how these new techniques are being used in her lab to better understand how organisms make use of the information in their genomes at the molecular level.
Before coming to Linfield, Reinke worked as a yeast cell biologist at the University of Chicago, where she engineered proteins and observed their movement in living cells to better understand how cellular compartments are organized and propagated. She later worked as a fruit fly geneticist at Northwestern University, where she began work to decipher the requirements for gene silencing and the molecular mechanisms of this silencing. This continues to be the focus of her work now.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and English from Carleton College and a Ph.D. in molecular genetics and cell biology from the University of Chicago. Her research is currently funded by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust.
The lecture is free and open to the public. The Linfield College faculty lecture series offers one presentation each month by a member of the Linfield faculty. For more information, call 503-883-2409.
