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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. ******************* 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.