Sep - Hamid Bolouri¶

Speaker: Hamid Bolouri

Talk Title: Decompostion of large-scale genetic regulatory networks into functional building blocks

Event Details

Date/Time:

September 14, 2006, 6pm

Affiliation: Currently at the Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle

UBC

Presentation: Download

Abstract:

The availability of a large number of annotated genomes has shown that

metazoan complexity arises primarily from more complex regulatory

interactions among genes and their products. At the same time, high

throughput technologies are delineating the location, abundance, state,

and interactions of genes and their products with increasing resolution

in terms of cell types, time points and conditions. A recent phenomenon

accompanying the reconstruction of large-scale molecular interaction

maps is the publication of often unfathomably large network diagrams.

For such figures to be comprehensible, it is necessary to superimpose

one or more layers of functional abstraction on top of the low-level

interactions that comprise these very complex networks. Using examples

from my group’s work, I will outline some limitations of existing

approaches to network decomposition and argue that we need to start at

the bottom, by characterizing the features necessary to impose a unique

function to building blocks of one or few genes. From these, a

hierarchical library of functional sub-system archetypes underlying all

GRNs may be constructed. I will present a few examples such “functional

building blocks”.

Student Speaker: William Hsiao, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Simon Fraser

Talk title: Genomic island analysis: Improved software and insights into an apparent

gene pool associated with genomic islands.

Presentation: Download