Abstract:
Repression of gene expression is an important regulatory mechanism that controls many biological processes such as development, cell proliferation and differentiation. The discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs) has broadened our perspectives on the mechanisms of down-regulation of gene expression and shed light on an entirely novel level of post-transcriptional regulation. Besides their important functions in the development of animals and plants, miRNAs have been shown to play crucial roles in the pathogenesis of many diseases, including cancer.

Since the discovery of the very first miRNA, almost all progresses on study of miRNA resorted to the help from computational approaches. In this talk, I will present my recent work on discovering modules in miRNA-spanned regulatory networks. Modularity is one of the most prominent properties of real-world complex networks including biological networks. Here, I will address the issue of module identification in an important class of networks, bipartite networks, and report a novel algorithm especially suited for module detection in them. By formulating them into bipartite networks, I analyzed the modules in the miRNA regulatory networks. I will show several real applications of my method in other biology problems and other areas. I will conclude with an overview of my research interests and plan of my future directions.

Biography:
Xuefeng Zhou is a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in Saint Louis. His advisor is Dr. Weixiong Zhang. He received his MS degree in computer science from Illinois Institute of Technology in 2003. Before that, he had obtained his MS degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Peking Union Medical College, and BS degree in biology from Peking (Beijing) University. He expects to receive his Ph.D degree in computer science in May, 2008. His primary research interests lie in bioinformatics/computational biology and data mining, and his current research focuses on computational studies of different aspects of miRNAs as well as other small RNAs.