“It's not the number of genes that matter, it's how you use them - quite literally how you switch them on and off. There's a lot of complexity in the human genome, not in the types of genes, the building blocks, the types of Lego, but how you put that Lego together inside each cell, which genes are on and which are off. And, you know, it's still unclear just how all of that works.” 

In this week’s episode of The G Word #sciencepodcast, Rich Scott is joined by Ewan Birney, bioinformatician, Deputy Director General of EMBL and Non-Executive Director at Genomics England. Ewan led the analysis of the Human Genome gene set, mouse and chicken genomes and the ENCODE project and his main areas of research include functional genomics, DNA algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information and use of images for chromatin structure. 

Today, Ewan talks about his work with the Human Genome Project, the sense of community amongst bioinformaticians and advances in leveraging genomic information. He also talks about which big topics don’t get enough attention and his research group.