Colloquium

Computational Approaches in Comparative Genomics

Jeffrey Chuang
Department of Biology
Boston College
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Higgins 310, 4 pm

In the past few years, there has been an explosion in the amount of sequenced DNA, including the complete genomes of human, mouse, and several yeasts, among many other organisms. This trove of information has created many opportunities for valuable quantitative analysis. I will describe two problems in comparative genomics which I have worked on in my transition from physicist to computational biologist. In the first, I will discuss the heterogeneity of mutation rates in the mouse and human genomes, and how natural selection appears to have acted on the locations of genes to make use of this heterogeneity. In the second, I will discuss mutation and selection in yeast. In contrast to mammals, mutation rates in yeast are uniform genome-wide. Because of this uniform rate, it is possible to estimate the amount of sequence under selection. I will describe novel methods to identify functional sequences via sequence conservation and explain their biological significance.