Miller Distinguished Lecture

October 11, 2007

Alliant Energy Lee Liu Auditorium, Howe Hall 3:30 p.m.

 

This lecture was made possible in part by the generosity of F. Wendell Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995 at age 97, was born in Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City, graduated from Grinnell College and Harvard Law School and practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to manage his family's farm holdings and to practice law. His will helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the annual earnings on which, in part, helped to support this activity.

 

The Departments of Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Mathematics at Iowa State University are proud to announce the Miller Distinguished Lecture:

Daniel GusfieldReCombinatorics: Combinatorial algorithms for studying the history of recombination in populations

Dr. Daniel M. Gusfield, University of California Davis


Abstract

The work discussed in this talk falls into the emerging area of Population Genomics.  I will first intro­duce the area and then talk about specific problems and combinatorial algorithms involved in the infer­ence of recombination from population data.

A phylogenetic network (or Ancestral Recombination Graph) is a generalization of a tree, allowing struc­tural properties that are not tree-like.  With the growth of genomic and population data (coming for ex­ample from the HAPMAP project) much of which does not fit ideal tree models, and the increasing ap­preciation of the genomic role of such phenomena as recombination (crossing-over and gene-conversion), recurrent and back mutation, horizontal gene transfer, and mobile genetic elements, there is greater need to understand the algorithmics and combinatorics of phylogenetic networks.

In this talk I will survey a range of our recent results on phylogenetic networks with recombination and show applications of these results to several issues in Population Genomics: Association Mapping; Finding Recombination Hotspots in genotype sequences; Imputing the values of missing haplotype data; Deter­mining the extent of recombination in the evolution of LPL sequences; Distinguishing the role of cross-over from gene-conversion in Arabidopsis; Characterizing some aspects of the haplotypes produced by the program PHASE; Studying the effect of using genotype data in place of haplotype data, imputing missing data, finding optimal recombination mosaics, etc.

Biography

Dr. Gusfield’s primary interests involve the efficiency of algorithms, particularly for problems in combi­natorial optimization and graph theory.  These algorithms have been applied to study data security, sta­ble matching, network flow, matroid optimization, string/pattern matching problems, molecular se­quence analysis, and optimization problems in population-scale genomics.  Currently, he is focused on string and combinatorial problems that arise in computational biology and bioinformatics.  He served as chair of the computer science department at UCD from July 2000 until August 2004, and is now the founding Editor-in-Chief of The IEEE/ACM Transactions of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.


Refreshments will be served.