Tying Developmental Gene Regulation to the Genome
California Institute of Technology
Date:
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Place: 3105 Engineering
Host: Charles Ofria
Abstract: The vast majority of genes present in the human genome are also present in all other animal genomes, and the developmental programs that yield different adult animals all use this common molecular toolkit. This suggests that different animal body plans are encoded largely by different regulatory programs, which control when and where genes function throughout development. Deciphering these regulatory programs requires many involved experiments, which can be time consuming and experimentally difficult. This process can be significantly aided by computational sequence analysis. I will discuss the computational approaches that I developed in building our model of the gene regulatory network (GRN) underlying sea urchin development. I will also briefly cover some related techniques I used to help elucidate the regulatory mechanisms underlying physiological responses in microbes. These approaches have not only helped us to understand biology, but have also contributed to our understanding of the mechanisms behind regulatory evolution in both animals and microbes.
Biography: Not Available