Московский семинар по биоинформатике - 4 февраля 2013

Понедельник, 4 февраля 2013, 18.00
МГУ, Лаб. корпус Б (факультет биоинженерии и биоинформатики), к. 221.


Сергей Нуждин
Университет Южной Калифорнии, США

Population Genetics + Systems Biology = Personalized Medicine?

Understanding how environmental conditions interact with metabolic reactions, cell signaling, and developmental pathways to translate an organism's genome into its phenotype is a grand challenge in biology. Genome wide association studies (GWAS) statistically connect genotypes to phenotypes, without any recourse to known molecular interactions, whereas a molecular biology approach directly ties gene function to phenotype through gene regulatory networks (GRNs). Using natural variation in allele-specific expression, GWAS and GRN approaches can be merged into a single framework via Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). This approach leverages the myriad of polymorphisms in natural populations to elucidate and quantitate the molecular pathways that underlie phenotypic variation. The SEM framework can be used to quantitate a GRN, to evaluate its consistency across environments or sexes, to identify the differences in GRNs between species, and to annotate GRNs de novo in non-model organisms.