COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON and BEYOND (CRIBB)

Date	Aug. 6, 2010
Speaker	Robin Friedman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Topic	High-throughput Sequencing and Computation in the search for a Gene Expression Code
Abstract:	The study of biology has historically been limited by a small set of slow and low-throughput tools. However, technological advances have led to an explosion in the amount of data available to biologists in the past few years. Almost overnight, computation has become an inextricable component of cutting-edge biology, especially in the field of gene expression, the study of how genetic sequence is translated into phenotypic effects. This talk will provide an overview of the impact of high-throughput sequencing on the study of gene expression from a computer science perspective. In particular, two examples will be presented: comparative genomics for microRNA binding sites and experimental quantification of transcription factor binding specificity.

Acknowledgements

We thank the generous support of MIT IS&T, CSAIL, and the Department of Mathematics for their support of this series.