Computational Approaches to Gene Regulation

GUEST LECTURER
Jun Liu

AFFILIATION
Harvard University, Dept. of Statistics

ABSTRACT
Understanding how genes are regulated in various circumstances (e.g.,heatshock, starvation, etc.) is a central problem in molecular biology. The adoption of large-scale biological data generation techniques such as
the mRNA microarrays has enabled researchers to tackle the gene regulation problem in a global way. I will survey some computational and statistical
strategies developed by our group on how to effectively use the gene
upstream sequence information in junction with mRNA expression microarray
data to dissect the gene regulatory network. I will describe in detail a
study of RacA binding activities in Bacillus Subtilis, explaining how
statistical approaches helped the biologists discover RacA's binding
sites. I will describe a new dimension reduction technique that has been
applied successfully to our gene regulation studies and show a cute
theorem supporting the technique.

DATE & TIME
Thursday, September 13, 2007 -- 10:00 AM

DURATION
1 hour

LOCATION
Executive Classroom 228, Main

CONTACT PERSON
Xiaoming Huo