Abstract:
The ongoing explosion of new technologies in functional genomics offers the
promise of understanding gene function, interactions, and regulation at the
systems level. This should enable us to develop comprehensive descriptions of
genetic systems of cellular controls, including those whose malfunctioning
becomes the basis of genetic disorders, such as cancer, and others whose
failure might produce developmental defects in model systems. However, the
complexity and scale of human molecular biology make it difficult to integrate
this body of data, understand it on a systems level, and apply it to the study
of specific pathways or genetic disorders. These challenges are further
exacerbated by the biological complexity of metazoans, including diverse
biological processes, individual tissue types and cell lineages, and by the
increasingly large scale of data in higher organisms.
I will describe how we address these challenges through the development of
bioinformatics frameworks for the study of gene function and regulation in
complex biological systems and through close coupling of these methods with
experiments, thereby contributing to understanding of human disease. I will
specifically discuss how integrated analysis of functional genomics data can be
leveraged to study cell-lineage specific gene expression, to identify proteins
involved in disease in a way complementary to quantitative genetics approaches,
and to direct both large-scale and traditional biological experiments.
Speaker bio:
Olga Troyanskaya is an Associate Professor in the Lewis-Sigler
Institute for Integrative Genomics and the Department of Computer
Science at Princeton University, USA, where she runs the Laboratory of
Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics. Her work bridges computer
science and molecular biology in an effort to develop better methods
for analysis of diverse genomic data with the goal of understanding
and modeling protein function and interactions in biological pathways.
Her group includes computational and experimental aspects, and tackles
diverse questions including developing integrative technologies for
pathway prediction and the study of biological networks in complex
human disease. Dr. Troyanskaya is an Associate Editor for
Bioinformatics, PLOS Computational Biology, and editorial board member
of Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Briefings in Bioinformatics, and
Biology Direct. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the
International Society for Computational Biology. She received her
Ph.D. from Stanford University and is a recipient of the Sloan
Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, the Howard Wentz faculty
award, and the Blavatnik Finalist Award. She has also been honored as
one of the top young technology innovators by the MIT Technology
Review and is the 2011 recipient of the Overton Prize in computational
biology.
