[Colloquium] TTI-C Talk: Xuefeng Zhou, Washington University in St Louis

[Julia MacGlashan]

> When:             Monday, May 4 @ 11:00am (lunch will be provided after
> talk)
> 
> Where:            6045 S Kenwood Ave, TTI-C Conference Room #526 (5th
> Floor)
> 
> Who:               Xuefeng Zhou (Washington University in St Louis)
> 
> Title:                Study of microRNAs: a Biology Problem with
> Computational Challenges
> 
> 
Repression of gene expression is an important regulatory mechanism that
controls many biological processes such as development, cell proliferation
and differentiation.  The discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs) has broadened our
perspectives on the mechanisms of down-regulation of gene expression and
shed light on an entirely novel level of post-transcriptional regulation.
Besides their important functions in the development of animals and plants,
miRNAs have been shown to play crucial roles in the pathogenesis of many
diseases, such as cancer. 

Since the discovery of the very first miRNA, almost all progresses on study
of miRNA resorted to the help from computational approaches. In this talk, I
will first present our recent work on the prediction of novel miRNAs.
Available computational methods rely on non-trivial number of known miRNAs,
clear genome annotations and evolutionary conservation information. We
developed a novel ranking algorithm based on random works to computationally
identify novel miRNAs. Our algorithm uses very few positive samples,
requires no negative sample and does not rely on genome annotation.
Secondly, I will present our work on genome-wide characterization of
promoters of miRNA genes. It is the first piece of work in this field and
has been well accepted by biologists. Moreover, I will discuss module
discovery in miRNA regulatory networks. Modularity is one of the most
prominent properties of real-world complex networks including biological
networks. Here, I will address the issue of module identification in
bipartite networks and report a novel algorithm especially suited for module
detection in them. I analyzed the modules in the miRNA regulatory networks
by formulating them into bipartite networks. Finally, I will conclude with
an overview of my research interests and plan of my future directions.

Bio: Xuefeng Zhou is a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of
Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in Saint Louis.
His advisor is Dr. Weixiong Zhang. He received his MS degree in computer
science from Illinois Institute of Technology in 2003. Before that, he
obtained his MS degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Peking
Union Medical College, and BS degree in biology from Peking (Beijing)
University. He expects to receive his Ph.D degree in computer science in
August, 2009.  His primary research interests lie in
bioinformatics/computational biology and data mining, and his current
research focuses on computational studies of different aspects of miRNAs as
well as other small RNAs. 

> Contact:          Jinbo Xu, TTI-C	j3xu at tti-c.org		834-2511
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