Prof Jukka Corander
Thu 20 Oct 2016, 11:00 - 12:00
IF 4.31/4.33

If you have a question about this talk, please contact: Gareth Beedham (gbeedham)

Title:

100 years after William Bateson - what can we learn about epistasis by today's statistical machine learning?

 

Abstract:

Roughly 100 years ago William Bateson coined the term epistasis, which is today generally considered as a form of interaction between two loci in DNA. Research in epistasis has over the years revealed fascinating biological insights, however, until very recently, progress has been slowed by limited availability of densely sampled population data.  Given the advent of latest sequencing technology we are finally facing possibility to query what experiments nature has performed concerning epistasis. I will present latest research results from a close collaboration with the Pathogen Genomics group at WTSI on how we can advance understanding about epistasis in genomes by exploiting core concepts from statistical physics and statistical machine learning algorithms for ultra-high dimensional models. Our genome-wide epistasis analysis reveals interacting networks of resistance, virulence and core machinery genes in Streptococcus pneumoniae.