All News and Events

25 March 2026

Event jointly organized by: AVE and St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research

21 May 2025

Event jointly organized by : Institute for Bioengineering of Catalunya (IBEC) and Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG)

22 May 2024

Our 7th Annual Mutational Scanning Symposium will be held at the Broad Institute in Cambridge Massachusetts May 22-24th, 2024

9 June 2025

BBI’s Shawn Fayer and Noelia Ferruz Capapey, a Group Leader at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, reflect on the 8th annual Mutational Scanning Symposium.

30 May 2025

Field of VEPs has grown rapidly, without clear standards

30 April 2025

Researchers from the Institute of Genetics and Cancer have been working with the Atlas of Variant Effects Alliance to provide practical guidelines for releasing new computational tools known as variant effect predictors (VEPs).

30 June 2025

Who do you ask if you have a question about a gene? In this episode, we dive into the teams and scientists that are building an encyclopedia of knowledge about your genes.

Transcript and show notes can be found here.

23 March 2025

We can predict the weather, but can we predict genetic diseases from your genome?

In this episode we explain the challenges and the promises of variant effect predictors (VEPs)

with experts Dr Debbie Marks and Dr Joe Marsh

8 November 2024

In this bonus episode, we interview scientists at the 7th Annual Mutational Scanning Symposium which took place May 22-24, 2024 at the Broad Institute. Here we chat about the future of this field, funny lab experiences, and how people got interested in variant interpretation. (We want to thank Dr. Buchser, Dr. Cagiada, Dr. Deyell, Dr. Kinney, Mr. Smith, and everybody else at MSS2024 for their participation.)

7 October 2025

Shelby Hemker is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan and is funded by the American Cancer Society. Shelby's work in the Dr. Jacob Kitzman Laboratory has included development of a new functional assay to measure DNA damage repair by the adenine glycosylase MUTYH, of which the pre-print is available on bioRxiv. Other projects include assaying other DNA repair factors linked to inherited cancers. Shelby's previous research experiences include her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied...morethe effects of hypoxia and microRNAs on kidney development under the mentorship of Dr. Jacqueline Ho and her BS from Michigan State University, where she studied inherited genetic disease in dogs and cats in Dr. John Fyfe's Laboratory of Comparative Medical Genetics. She is finishing up her tenure as a postdoc and will soon enter the academic job market, looking for opportunities to build upon past experience to develop new assays to resolve unknowns about inherited disease.

7 October 2025

Karl Romanowicz is a Principal Scientist at SynPlexity and a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Plesa Lab in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Oregon. His talk will highlight work recently published in Science Advances, where he and colleagues developed large-scale synthetic gene libraries and applied broad mutational scanning to decode variant effects in dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR), revealing how sequence variation drives antibiotic resistance across the protein family. He holds a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the...moreUniversity of Michigan, with broad expertise across microbial ecology, synthetic biology, and functional genomics.

4 November 2025

Nikhil is a graduate student in the Pritchard lab at Stanford University. He is interested in statistical and population genetics, and is exploring the relationship between gene expression and complex traits during his PhD.