PROGRAM
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       14:15 - 14:30  Refreshments

       14:30 - 15:30 "Technologies to Decode the Cancer Epigenome
       for Research and
       Diagnostics"

       Efrat Shema
       Department of Immunology and Regenerative Biology,
       Weizmann Institute of Science

       Abstract: Within the nanoscopic depths of the human cell
       nucleus, a two-meter spool of DNA is tightly coiled around tiny,
       ball-shaped nucleosomes. Dr. Efrat  Shema works with the histone
       proteins that make up these nucleosomes, which are collectively
       responsible for packaging and organizing DNA strands. As these
       proteins undergo modifications, termed epigenetic modifications,
       they can alter the accessibility of different regions of the DNA
       and dictate which genes will be expressed. Such modifications are
       a critical part of the regulatory systems that determine how stem
       cells differentiate into specialized cells, how cancer
       cells avoid chemotherapy, and how tumors survive.
       The Shema lab focuses on the development of novel
       single-molecule and single-cell technologies to reveal the
       combinatorial patterns of epigenetic
       modifications with unprecedented precision. In recent
       high-profile publications, they show the value of these
       technologies in elucidating epigenetic heterogeneity
       within tumors, with important clinical implications. Moreover,
       building on their single-molecule
       technology, they developed a liquid-biopsy approach that
       allows diagnosis of cancer from a routine blood

     Work done in collabortion with Guy Ron

     15:30 - 16:00 Coffee break


       16:00 - 17:00 "Missing beauty of proton-proton
       interactions"

                       Iakov Aizenberg
                       Faculty of Physics, Weizmann Institute

       Abstract: Multiparton interactions in proton-proton
       collisions have long
       been a topic of great interest. A new look at them has
       begun to emerge from
       work being done to understand the dynamics of ‘small
       systems’, a topic that is
       taking center stage in the physics of relativistic
       heavy-ion interactions. Numerous studies conducted at the LHC and
       lower energies reveal that proton-proton collisions at high energy
       form a system in which
       final state interactions substantially impact
       experimentally observable
       quantities in the soft sector. However, until recently, no
       evidence was shown that final state interactions could also affect
       observables produced
       in the hard scattering processes. Studies performed by the
       LHC experiments
       present strong evidence that the final state interactions
       in proton-proton
       collisions have a drastic impact on the b-quark bound
       states production, whose yields may be reduced by more than a
      factor of two.