Speaker:	Dr. Jie Zheng
		National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)
		National Institutes of Health (NIH)
		USA

Title;		"Association Studies of Meiotic Recombination Hotspots in
		 Human Genome"

Date:		Monday, 30 March, 2009

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F
		(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theatre, near lift nos. 25/26)
		HKUST

Abstract:

Meiotic recombination plays important roles in physiology, genetics and
evolution. Recombination events tend to cluster into narrow spans of a few
thousand DNA bases, called recombination hotspots. These hotspots are
inheritable, but not conserved between human and chimpanzee and vary among
different human ethnic groups. An open question is what regulatory signals
are responsible for the existence of a hotspot at a particular genomic
location. In this talk, I will present a novel computational approach
towards answering this question. Based on coalescent models of sequence
evolution, we provide the first look at the large scale association of
recombination hotspots with DNA sequence polymorphism, and demonstrate the
existence of such association for a significant fraction of hotspots.
Importantly, our computational method is able to correctly predict the
association of the Single Nucleotide Polymorphism FG11 with the hotspot
DNA2, which has been reported by sperm typing experiments. The validity of
our approach is also supported by extensive simulations. At the end of the
talk, I will discuss future challenges and plans to discover regulatory
elements of recombination hotspots, and (if time permits) a few on-going
projects in Systems Biology.


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Biography:

Jie Zheng is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for
Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Institutes of Health (NIH),
USA. He received his Ph.D. in 2006 from the University of California,
Riverside, and his B.E. in 2000 from Zhejiang University, China, both in
Computer Science. His research interests include Algorithm Design,
Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Recently, his work has been
focused on data mining in Population Genetics and Systems Biology. While
trained as a Computer Scientist, Dr. Zheng maintains active and
long-standing collaborations with Life Scientists.