Thursday, Nov 17, 6pm – Paul Pavlidis, The ruin of gene network analysis by multifunctionality‏

Please post poster available at http://vanbug.org
—————————————————————-
Next VanBUG (Vancouver Bioinformatics User Group) talk is on Thursday,
November 17 at 6pm. The seminar is followed by pizza, refreshments and
great networking.
*Note* Nov 17 is a week later than the usual monthly VanBUG date.

*Intro speaker* (10mins): Rebecca Worsley Hunt, PhD candidate, Wasserman
Lab at Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT)

Title: Genome nucleotide composition and sequence length affect
over-representation predictions of transcription factor binding sites in
ChIP-based experiments

*Featured speaker*: Paul Pavlidis, Associate Professor, CHiBi and
Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia
http://www.chibi.ubc.ca/faculty/pavlidis

The ruin of gene network analysis by multifunctionality

A major goal of biology is to identify the functional relationships and
interactions among genes and apply this knowledge to make predictive
models. In bioinformatics, it is now routine to use various types of
gene network and gene function information to interpret
high-throughput experiments. Examples include “GO enrichment”,
network-motivated clustering or gene function prediction methods (e.g.
“guilt by association”) and candidate gene prioritization methods. I
will describe how a phenomenon we call “gene multifunctionality”
distorts such analyses. Genes having high multifunctionality are the
source of serious biases or artifacts that can distract attention from
more interesting signals, cause misleading results in algorithm
evaluations, and generally make meaningfully applying known information
on gene function extremely difficult. I will argue that this problem is
ignored at our peril, and suggest some possible remedies and strategies
for making progress.

Please note:
Students are invited to meet with the VanBUG speaker for open discussion
of both science and career paths. This takes place 4:30-5:30pm in either
the Boardroom or Lunchroom on the ground floor of the BCCRC

Recommended Reading
The impact of multifunctional genes on “guilt by association” analysis
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21364756

Location:
675 West 10th Avenue
Gordon and Leslie Diamond Family Theatre
BC Cancer Agency

Date/Time:
Start Date: 17/11/2011
Start Time: 6:00 PM
End Time: 7:30 PM

Contact Name:
Stefanie Butland
dev@vanbug.org
http://vanbug.org

The VanBUG team:
Stefanie Butland
Cedric Chauve
Bhavjinder Dhillon
Elodie Portales-Casamar

VanBUG is generously sponsored by the CIHR Bioinformatics Training
Program, MITACS, GenomeBC, and the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops
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http://perutz.cmmt.ubc.ca/mailman/vanbug/listinfo/announcements

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