Title: Interpreting the Human Genome
Speaker: Professor Manolis Kellis
Affiliation: EECS Department, USA.
Date: January 2, 2009
Abstract:
With the completion of the human genome, the challenge of interpreting the 3 billion letters that encode a human being has put computational biology at the center stage of biomedical research. Comparative genomics of multiple mammalian species has emerged as one of the most powerful and systematic ways to identify the functional elements encoded in the human genome, by virtue of their conservation across millions of years of evolution. These elements are subtle and hidden in millions of non-functional nucleotides, requiring new techniques to decipher them and to understand their roles across diverse experimental and functional datasets.
In my group, we have used comparative genomics of multiple closely related species for the de-novo discovery of protein-coding genes, RNA structures, microRNAs, developmental enhancers, regulatory motifs, and biological networks. We have applied these approaches to 32 mammalian genomes, 12 flies, and 17 fungi, in each case revealing thousands of novel functional elements, and many new insights on eukaryotic and animal biology and regulation. In addition, comparative genomics has enabled us to study the evolutionary dynamics of genomes, including gene family expansion, whole-genome duplication, and their role in the emergence of new gene functions. In this talk I will describe our recent results in this area, with particular emphasis on our recent work on understanding global gene regulation at the pre- and post-transcriptional level, including developmental enhancers, chromatin state, and microRNA function.
Brief Bio of Speaker:
Manolis Kellis is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at MIT, a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He holds the Karl Van Tassel chair in EECS and has previously held the Distinguished Alumnus 1964 chair. He has received the NSF CAREER award, an NIH R01 for work in Computational Genomics, and is a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan foundation. He was recognized for his research in genomics as one of the top young innovators under the age of 35 by Technology Review Magazine, one of the principal investigators of the future by Genome Technology magazine, and one of three young scientists representing the next generation in biotechnology by the Boston Museum of Science. He obtained his Ph.D. from MIT, where he received the Sprowls award for the best doctorate thesis in computer science, and the first Paris Kanellakis graduate fellowship. Prior to computational biology, Manolis worked on artificial intelligence, sketch and image recognition, robotics, and computational geometry, at MIT and at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Manolis lived in Greece and France before moving to the US.