The Sidow lab's main inspiration is evolution, which is not only beautiful and surprising but also useful and relevant. Specifically, they focus on the evolution of function, which they are currently exploring in cancer.

They have several cancer evolution projects ongoing in which we explore the relationship between structural and functional evolution of the cancer genome.

Cutting-edge genomics technologies play a big role in the Sidow lab's research. For example, they are currently making extensive use of 10X Technology's read clouds to perform better phasing and structural variant calling in cancer genomes. Similarly, they are beginning to use Oxford Nanopore's long reads for genome assembly. They develop lab protocols as well as computational approaches for these new technologies.