A DNA Code that switches hundreds of thousands of genetic messages

What is the digital code stored in your genome that governs how your genes will be used to carry out diverse activities, such as wiring together neural networks? Under different cellular conditions, genes produce different genetic messages, or messenger RNAs (mRNAs). mRNA expression involves DNA transcription followed by splicing, which assembles each mRNA using carefully selected subsequences derived from DNA. Because of splicing, a gene can encode many different mRNAs, depending on cell type, age and disease; there are 22,000 human genes, but there are hundreds of thousands of different mRNAs produced by splicing. The genetic information that controls splicing on a genome-wide scale has remained a mystery for two decades. I’ll describe how recently-developed technologies and algorithms have enabled researchers to assemble a DNA code that explains tissue-dependent mRNA regulation and makes accurate predictions. The seminar will be aimed at non-experts..

Speaker Details

Brendan J. Frey is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. In Spring 2001, he will join the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto where he will head the Adaptive Algorithms Laboratory. He completed his doctoral work in collaboration with Geoffrey Hinton’s group at the University of Toronto in 1997, where he was an NSERC 1967 Science and Engineering Scholar. From 1997 to 1999, he was appointed Beckman Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he continues to be an adjunct faculty member in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has given over 30 invited talks and published over 60 papers on inference and estimation in complex probability models for machine learning, computer vision, iterative decoding, signal processing, automated diagnosis, data compression and pattern recognition. Recently, MIT Press published his book, Graphical Models for Machine Learning and Digital Communication. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the February 2001 special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, titled Codes on Graphs and Iterative Algorithms. In December 2000, he received the Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award.

Date:
Speakers:
Brendan Frey
Affiliation:
University of Toronto

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