Colloquia, Seminars and Conference News
Title : Analysis of Genome Duplications and Rearrangements in Evolution and Cancer
Date : February 29, 2008. (11:00 am) Tea starts half an hour before each seminar
Location: ITEB 336
Speaker : Prof. Ben Raphael
Abstract:
Every time a cell divides, it makes a copy of its DNA. Errors in this process lead to mutations that can be changes in single letters of the DNA sequence or more complicated rearrangements, gains, or losses of large pieces of DNA. In this talk, I will describe algorithms to study these genome rearrangements and copy number changes, focusing on two biological contexts. The first is the analysis of the patterns of overlapping rearrangements and duplications that have recently been identified in cancer genomes. The second is the study of segmental duplications that are common in mammalian genomes. Many of these segmental duplications are complex mosaics of fragments of other segmental duplications, and thus determining the evolutionary history of these genomic regions is a challenging problem. In both of these contexts, the algorithms I describe are based on finding a parsimonious sequence of rearrangement and duplication operations that transform one genomic sequence into another sequence.
Bio: Ben Raphael is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department and the Center for Computational Molecular Biology at Brown University since fall 2006. His research interests are in the development and application of computational and mathematical techniques to understand biological systems, with particular emphasis on computational cancer genomics and comparative genomics. Prior to coming to Brown, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, where he also received his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2002. He is the recipient of a Career Award at the Scientific Interface from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.
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