by
Mathieu Blanchette(School of Computer Science, McGill University. McGill Center for Bioinformatics)
→
Europe/Stockholm
RB35 (RB35)
RB35
RB35
Seminar room RB35 (Roslagstullsbacken 35, the SBC house)
Description
This talk will describe how a whole-genome computational prediction and analysis of human regulatory regions can yield important insights into gene regulation, and how genome evolution, and in particular computationally reconstructed ancestral DNA sequences, can help in this process. I will first describe a approach to the detection of cis-regulatory modules that exploits both inter-species comparison and binding site clustering. The analysis of the ~120,000 modules identified by this algorithm reveals a number of interesting observations regarding the overall distribution properties of the modules, but also regarding the properties of the individual transcription factors predicted to bind them. These properties include association to particular expression patterns or function, co-occurrences of binding sites for pairs of transcription factors, and broad regulatory network properties. In the second part of the talk, I will briefly introduce a joint project with Dr. David Haussler and Dr. Webb Miller, aiming to reconstruct the complete genome of ancestral mammals. I will focus on how this ancestral sequence information can help our study of the evolution of regulatory mechanisms in mammals, and how these sequences can be used to predict human regulatory regions more accurately.