From CAGT

History of Center for Advanced Genomic Technology (CAGT)

CAGT evolved from the Molecular Engineering Research Laboratory(MERL), which was founded by Charles DeLisi in 1990 as a new interdisciplinary program in Boston University's College of Engineering. The primary participants in the work of the Center are faculty and students in the Bioinformatics program at Boston University.

Biological cells have developed methods for transmission and control of information, for memory and learning, and for error correction and adaptation, which were optimized over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Recent developments in high throughput experimental and computational methods have placed us, for the first time, in a position to understand these processes and to use them in clinical medicine and engineering in ways that currently can barely be glimpsed. CAGT is positioned to play an important role in such progress through new forms of collaboration and training that will provide the intellectual foundation required for breakthrough technologies in computation, information handling and engineering.