Speaker: | Brian Golding |
Department of Biology | |
McMaster University |
Title: An exploration of topics in sequence analysis
The talk is a broad overview of different projects that my group has worked on in the past year. The projects, chosen to provide a flavour of the contemporary research in bioinformatics, include:
- identifying spanning sets of oligos, a project on the best way to find short DNA sequences that can be used to mark and measure gene presence,
- Identifying species from their DNA; this is part of a much larger initiative called the “Barcode of Life” and is now commonly used at a coarser level in environmental metagenomics,
- determining functional regions from protein sequences; this research makes use of phylogenetic HMMs to detect sequence conservation, and
- examining mutations in DNA sequences where we are examining the effects of low complexity sequences on complete protein sequences.