The Daily Bulletin Archive

Please join the Biology Department for the seminar "Characterization and Evolution of Insect Transcriptional Regulatory Elements," presented by Marc S. Halfon, associate professor in the University at Buffalo's Department of Biochemistry and Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, on Monday, October 6, from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in Technology Building 160.

All faculty, staff, and students are welcome.

Seminar Abstract
Defining the DNA sequences that regulate gene expression is equally as important as characterizing genes themselves, but often much more difficult. We have constructed the REDfly database of all known transcriptional cis-regulatory modules in the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, and used these data to develop computational methods for regulatory element discovery. Our supervised machine learning approach is able to discover new Drosophila regulatory modules with success rates in the neighborhood of 90 percent true-positive predictions. Moreover, we have found that the Drosophila data contained within REDfly can also be used for regulatory element discovery in insect species with as much as 350 My divergence, including those with medical (e.g., mosquito) and agricultural (e.g., honeybee) importance. Our methods, therefore, allow for regulatory element discovery in a broad range of insects, even in the absence of significant experimental data for each sequenced species. Comparing the sequence and function of distantly related regulatory modules will provide insight into how transcriptional regulatory sequences and the regulatory networks in which they participate have evolved.