Brown University | Center for Computational Molecular Biology

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May 2010, Symposium: "John von Neumann Days" and
"The Genome and the Computational Sciences: The Next Paradigms"

CCMB Distinguished Lecture Series
Mark Boguski Center for Biomedical Informatics Harvard Medical School How Medical Sequencing and Network Biology Will Enable Personalized Medicine

Applications of next-generation nucleic acid sequencing technologies will lead to the development of precision diagnostics. Terabyte-scale, multidimensional data sets derived from these methods will be used to reverse engineer the specific disease pathways that underlie individual patients’ conditions. Modeling and simulation of these pathways in the presence of virtual drugs, and combinations of drugs, will identify the most efficacious therapy for precision medicine and customized care. The practice of medicine will routinely employ network biology analytics supported by high-performance computing.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009
4:00 pm
CIT Building, Room 241 – SWIG Boardroom

Refreshments will be served at 3:45 pm

Joint CCMB/MPPB/Psychiatry Seminar
Jason Moore Dartmouth Medical School Bioinformatics Challenges for Genome-Wide Association Studies

Human genetics is currently dominated by the genome-wide association study (GWAS) that measures and evaluates one million or more single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for their disease associations. The current biostatistical paradigm is to analyze each SNP individually without regard to the rest of the genome or environmental exposure.

This agnostic or unbiased approach has not been successful for identifying SNPs with moderate or large effects on disease susceptibility. We present here an alternative bioinformatics strategy for GWAS analysis that focuses on gene-gene and gene-environment interactions and their context in biochemical pathways.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009
3:00pm
LMM - 70 Ship Street, Room 107

Refreshments will be served at 2:45 pm

CCMB Lecture Series
Art Covert Michigan State University The Hidden Lives of Deleterious Mutations: Transiting fitness valleys via sign-epistatic stepping stones

The role of deleterious mutations in evolution has been much debated. While many researchers believe that any mutation that reduces fitness must impede adaptive evolution, recent studies have shown that this is not always the case. Deleterious mutations may have their fitness effects reversed by a second, sign-epistatic mutation, which can also allow populations to pass through fitness valleys. It is unknown if these sign-epistatic recoveries are fortuitous accidents, or a driving force behind evolution. Using digital organisms, I compared the progress of adaptive evolution when all deleterious mutations were immediately reverted with control treatments in which they were allowed to enter the population. Deleterious mutations reduce fitness over the short term, by definition, and they comprise the majority of mutations in populations of digital organisms, as in biological ones. In my experiments, long-term adaptive evolution was accelerated in those populations in which deleterious mutations were allowed to remain, because some of them served as stepping stones across otherwise impassible fitness valleys, thereby facilitating the evolution of complex features.

Wednesday, January 27, 2009
4:00pm
CIT Bldg, Room 241, SWIG Boardroom

Refreshments will be served at 3:45 pm