CS 201: From Biological Problems to Combinatorial Algorithms (and back)

Abstract:

An important question in genome evolution is whether there exist fragile regions
(rearrangement hotspots) where chromosomal rearrangements are happening over and over again. We demonstrate that fragile regions are subject to a 
''birth and death'' process, implying that fragility has limited evolutionary lifespan.
  This finding implies that fragile regions migrate to different locations in different mammals, explaining why there exists relatively few chromosomal breakpoints shared between distant branches of the evolutionary tree.
  The birth and death of fragile regions phenomenon  reinforces the hypothesis that rearrangements are promoted 
by matching segmental duplications and suggests putative locations of the currently active fragile regions in the human genome.

This is a joint work with Max Alekseyev at University of South Carolina.

Bio:

Dr. Pevzner is Ronald R. Taylor Chair professor of Computer Science and Director of the NIH Center for Computational Mass Spectrometry at University of California, San Diego. He holds Ph.D. (1988) from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia. Dr. Pevzner has authored graduate textbook "Computational Molecular Biology: An Algorithmic Approach" in 2000  and undergraduate  textbook "Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms" in 2004 (jointly with Neal Jones). He directs the Graduate Program in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at UCSD. He was named Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in 2006 and ACM Fellow in 2010.