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November 28, Monday
12:00 – 14:00

The human genome, the hereditary material we pass on to our progeny, can be seen as a three billion letter string over a DNA alphabet of four. We can currently understand 1.5% of this mass, mostly in the form of genes, DNA substrings that explain how to build proteins, the quintessential constituents of every living cell.

The remainder 98.5% of our genome was deemed as "junk". This picture changed recently when we first obtained the genome sequence of other species. By comparing these genomes to our own we were able to pinpoint the locations of a staggering one million additional human subsequences that must be important to the human cell but do not code for genes. The functions of these regions remain largely unknown, and their sheer volume overwhelms any comprehensive experimental approach.

Coupled with preliminary results from the lab for small sets of these substrings, this data offers a tremendous opportunity to contribute key biological observations using computational approaches. I will discuss several of our own works, aimed at understanding what these subsequence do, and how they came into being.

The talk will assume no prior knowledge in Biology.