Department Seminars

General Information

When: Thursdays from 4:00–4:50 p.m.
Where: 1170 TMCB

W. Evan Johnson
Brigham Young University
Department of Statistics

2007-12-13

Statistical Applications in Genomics and Epigenomics

This talk is designed to introduce the role of statistics in the fields of genomics and epigenomics. Genomics is the study of the entire genome of an entire organism, and epigenomics is the study of heritable genomic modifications beyond the changes found in DNA sequence. Biological research in genomics and epigenomics produce massive data sets, often containing tens or hundreds of millions of data points. In addition, these data are often very noisy, so the true biological signal of interest is often difficult to detect in the data. Therefore, due to these characteristics of the data, innovative analysis methods and efficient computational algorithms are required in order find the true biological phenomena of interest. This talk will discuss the steps to analyzing genomic and epigenetic data and will discuss a few common and novel methods available for these data.