Abstract:
Genome sequencing projects provide the DNA sequence of different organisms, and thus provide vital information for understanding the organisms and their cellular processes. Genome sequencing projects have now expanded to generate genomic sequence data of multiple closely related organisms with the goal of understanding the genetic basis of their commonalities and differences. Comparative genomics data play an important role in bioinformatic analysis. For example, when making predictions using the data from one genome, one can use the genomic data from other closely related organisms to validate and improve good predictions while filtering out bad ones.

A regulatory element is an important pattern or “signal”, often located in the promoter of a gene, which is used in the process of turning a gene either on or off. In this talk, a new EM-based algorithm called IEM to improve the prediction of regulatory elements using comparative genomics data will be presented. A new method to improve the prediction of protein-protein interaction networks and a new approach to improve the prediction of functional annotations of proteins based on interaction networks will also be presented.

Bio:
Erliang Zeng is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University. He received his MS degree in Computer Science from Florida International University in 2007. He also received his BS degree in Biotechnology and MS degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in 1998 and 2001, respectively. His research interests are in the general areas of Bioinformatics and Data Mining. His current research focuses on heterogeneous biological data integration, and mining of gene regulatory information and protein-protein interactions. He has published 10 journal papers, 7 conference papers and 1 book chapter. He is the recipient of the FIU Presidential Graduate Fellowship, a 2007-08 Dissertation Year Fellowship, and the 2007 Excellence in Graduate Research Award from the School of Computing and Information Sciences. He is expected to complete his PhD in Summer 2008.