Sunday, Dec 11, 2005, 11:15-12:15
Room 309
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Gill Bejerano
UC
Title:
The Human Genome: Solving a Million Mysteries
The human genome, the hereditary material we pass on to our progeny,
can be seen as a 3 billion letter string over a DNA alphabet of four.
We currently understand 1.5% of this mass, mostly in the form of genes,
DNA substrings that explain how to build proteins, the quintessential
constituents of every living cell.
The remainder 98.5% of our genome was deemed as "junk".
This picture changed recently when we first obtained the genome sequence
of other species. By comparing these genomes to ours we were able to
pinpoint the locations of a staggering one million additional human
subsequences that must be important to the human cell but do not encode
proteins. The functions of these regions remain largely unknown, and
their sheer volume overwhelms any comprehensive experimental approach.
Guided by experimental results for few of these subsequence, we can use
computational approaches to deal with the tremendous challenge of
understanding this data and providing key biological observations.
I will describe a graph theoretic approach to understand these regions,
analyze some of the most perplexing regions within the human genome,
and track down a phenomenon of turning genomic junk into gold.
The talk will assume no prior knowledge in Molecular Biology.