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.