Capital Area Theory Seminar

In the past decade, computational molecular biology has focused on analyzing the structure, function and evolution of individual genes. Now that the complete DNA sequence has been determined for more than a dozen genomes, the focus is shifting to analysis of the interaction and evolution of the full set of genes in an organism. This talk addresses computational methods for studying how complex genomes evolved from simple ones. For example, duplication of genetic material followed by mutation yields a more complex set of genes with more diverse functions. I will present a computational approach to finding duplicated genomic regions. Analysis of observed duplicated regions can be used to reconstruct genome evolution and build stochastic models of the process of duplication. These models of duplication, in turn, can increase our understanding of the structure and function of genomes.

Contact: Vincenzo Liberatore (liberato@umiacs.umd.edu)