University of Southern California
Ray R. Irani Hall
Molecular and Computational Biology
Computational Biology Colloquium
Saurabh Sinha
Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
"Function and Evolution of Enhancers in Drosophila Development –
The Informatics Approach"
Abstract:
Cis-regulatory modules (enhancers) are central to our understanding of transcriptional regulation in metazoan genomes, especially in the context of developmental systems. A rich history of experimental work in Drosophila has enabled today the existence of an entire database (REDfly) of such enhancers and the binding sites within them, along with their expression “read-out”. This opens up an opportunity for us to understand the underlying principles of combinatorial regulation through systems-level analyses. It also provides the “training data” for developing informatics approaches to prediction of novel enhancers and, to some extent, the prediction of expression patterns driven by those enhancers. Last, but not least, these enhancers, when used in conjunction with the multiple Drosophila genomes available today, can provide insights into the evolution of cis-regulatory sequences.
I will present my group’s recent work in these directions, i.e., the discovery, function and evolution of Drosophila enhancers, and try to convey the excitement that they bring to the field of bioinformatics. Group web site: http://veda.cs.uiuc.edu/sinhalab/
Thursday, February 25, 2010
2:00 pm
RRI 101
