** This week's seminar has been cancelled due to the cancellation of the speaker's flight on account of bad weather. **
Friday, 19 April 2013 at 11:30am
Room 1400 Biomedical and Physical Sciences Bldg.
Refreshments at 11:30
Speaker: Ian Korf, Genome Center, University of California-Davis
Title: Genomics and Bioinformatics to the Rescue: Solving Complex Problems with Simple Models and Loads of Data
Abstract:
Recent advances in high throughput biology and information technology
have changed how we investigate and understand the biological world.
10 years ago, the few genomes that were available had been sequenced by
international consortia and had price tags in the millions of dollars.
Today, graduate students are sequencing genomes in the course of their
dissertations. Biology can be an incredibly data-rich endeavor, and the
skills of the modern biologist now often include unfamiliar terms like
SQL, R, Perl, Unix, etc. Despite the outward changes, the major biological
questions have remained unchanged. However, we can now use new techniques
to answer these questions in ways that would have been hard to imagine
previously. In this talk, I will discuss how we have addressed some
long-standing problems in gene expression (CpG islands, protein-DNA
interactions, and intron function) using a little bioinformatics and
a lot of sequencing.