[Mar 29, 2018] SFU-Omics Group 10th Meeting – Challenges in Annotation

Post date: Apr 23, 2018 2:34:04 AM

This month we are excited to have an “Annotation” themed meeting. Matthew Douglas (MSc Candidate, MBB, SFU organizer) and Dr. Maxwell Libbrecht (Professor, Comp. Sci) discussed the current annotation challenges from the RNA expression and methylation level.

“Quantifying the Coding Capacity of The Genome” – Matthew Douglas

The C. elegans genome is the first published eukaryotic genome, yet, the current annotation of the genome is still incomplete. In this talk, Matt presents the challenges in defining accurate splice patterns and detecting alternative splicing in C. elegans. Using a meta-analysis approach, he demonstrates how he uses 998 publicly available RNA-Seq libraries to confirm known introns and identify novel introns across developmental stages and tissues in C. elegans.

"Understanding gene regulation through graph-based posterior regularization in structured probabilistic models" – Dr. Maxwell Libbrecht

In this talk, Dr. Libbrecht speaks on his involvement in the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project. Utilizing the semi-automated genomic annotation (SAGA) algorithm, he co-developed a tool called Segway to characterize an unified encyclopedia of functional elements in the human genome. To explore how these functional elements can influence gene expression in three-dimension, he developed a novel computational method called graph-based regularization (GBR) that can use Hi-C dataset to address that question. His work demonstrates the importance of machine learning techniques, such as structured probabilistic models, to Omics-related research!

Check out Dr. Libbrecht’s cool research here: https://noble.gs.washington.edu/proj/encyclopedia/

We are very happy to see many familiar and new faces. Hope to see you again at our upcoming meetings!