The 46th In Silico Megabank Research Seminar will be held on Friday, February 21.

This Time, we will be welcoming Dr. Frith, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology as our lecturer, and he will be speaking on “Adapting classic statistical alignment to modern high-throughput DNA”.

・Date/Time: February 21(Fri.) 17:00‐18:30
・Venue: Conference Room 1(2nd Floor), Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization
・Title: Adapting classic statistical alignment to modern high-throughput DNA
・Lecturer: Martin Frith（Computational Biology Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology）

＊This lecture is transferable as a class in the medical research-related lecture course.

・Abstract: For many decades, the main way of analyzing biological sequences has been by comparing and aligning them.  This remains true today.  Modern tasks include: comparing whole genomes; aligning bisulfite-converted DNA reads to a genome; aligning long, high-error sequences from single molecule sequencers; aligning ancient or degraded DNA; comparing metagenomic DNA to a protein database. Over the decades, statistically powerful alignment techniques have been developed, including: log likelihood ratio scoring matrices, pair hidden Markov models, and probabilistic gnment.  Unfortunately, these methods are rarely used with modern deep sequencing data, perhaps because they are thought to be too slow.  This talk will demonstrate that they can be made fast enough, and offer great benefits. This talk will also sketch how to incorporate some new features into classic statistical alignment: sequence quality data (phred scores); pairing relationships between DNA reads; and split alignment, where different parts of one query sequence may align to disjoint loci in a genome.  This is useful for genome rearrangements, spliced RNA (including trans-splicing), and even whole genome comparison.  The statistical approach can tell us the reliability (unambiguity) of any part of an alignment.

・Organizer: Masao Nagasaki

Access : http://www.megabank.tohoku.ac.jp/english/info/access.html