Integrated analysis of functional genomics data: on the road to systems-level understanding of disease and enabling molecular medicine
Olga Troyanskaya,
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics
Princeton University
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Abstract: The ongoing explosion of new technologies in functional genomics
offers the promise of understanding gene function, interactions, and
regulation at the systems level. This should enable us to develop
comprehensive descriptions of genetic systems of cellular controls,
including those whose malfunctioning becomes the basis of genetic
disorders, such as cancer, and others whose failure might produce
developmental defects in model systems. However, the complexity and
scale of human molecular biology make it difficult to integrate this
body of data, understand it from a systems level, and apply it to the
study of specific pathways or genetic disorders. These challenges are
further exacerbated by the biological complexity of metazoans,
including diverse biological processes, individual tissue types and
cell lineages, and by the increasingly large scale of data in higher
organisms.
I will describe how we address these challenges through the
development of bioinformatics frameworks for the study of gene
function and regulation in complex biological systems, thereby
contributing to understanding of human disease. Specifically, I will
describe HEFalMP, a Bayesian integration system we developed that
provides maps of functional activity and interactions in over 200
areas of human cellular biology and disease, each including
information from ~30,000 genome-scale experiments pertaining to
~25,000 human genes. This system predicts protein function and
functional modules, cross-talk among biological processes, and
association of novel genes and pathways with known genetic disorders.
For more information, please explore: http://function.princeton.edu/,
function.princeton.edu/spell, and function.princeton.edu/hefalmp
Presenter Biography: Olga Troyanskaya is an Associate Professor at the Lewis-Sigler
Institute for Integrative Genomics and the Department of Computer
Science at Princeton University, where she runs the Laboratory of
Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics. Her work bridges computer
science and molecular biology in an effort to develop better methods
for analysis of diverse genomic data with the goal of understanding
and modeling protein function and interactions in biological pathways.
Her group combines computational methods with an experimental
component in a unified effort to develop comprehensive descriptions of
genetic systems of cellular controls, including those whose
malfunctioning becomes the basis of genetic disorders, such as cancer,
and others whose failure might produce developmental defects in model
systems. Dr. Troyanskaya is an associate editor for Bioinformatics,
PLOS Computational Biology, and editorial board member of Journal of
Biomedical Informatics, Briefings in Bioinformatics, and Biology
Direct. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the
International Society for Computational Biology. She received her
Ph.D. from Stanford University and is a recipient of the Sloan
Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, and the Howard Wentz
faculty award. She has also been honored as one of the top young
technology innovators (TR35) by the MIT Technology Review
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