Abstract:

Biology is going through a period of fundamental change. The complete genome sequence for an increasing number of organisms is becoming available. Currently, the full DNA sequence for several unicellular organisms are at hand and it is expected that the full DNA sequences will become available for well known multi-cellular organisms within a few years. The most pressing problem in the post-genome sequencing era will be to understand the integrated functions of thousands of genes. This forms the core of the new central dogma, shown below. This talk will highlight computational approaches to assigning structure and function to gene products and the creation of a web-based infrastructure for biological databases, interfaces and analysis tools.

		The “New” Central Dogma
~ Scientific Challenges - Deciphering the genome, mapping the genotype-phenotype relationships, dissecting organismic function, engineering organisms with altered functionality, figuring out complex traits and polymorphism, understanding physiology. ~ Algorithmic Challenges - comparisons of whole and partial genomes, metrics for similarity and homology, metabolic reconstruction, dissecting pathways, and whole cell modeling. ~ Computational Challenges - creation the informatics infrastructure, creation, annotation, curation and dissemination of databases, development of parallel computational methods.