Graduate Student Seminar

Title: Comparative Genomics Meets Genome Assembly: from Ancestral Reconstruction to Genome Scaffolding
Speaker:Sergey Aganezov

Abstract: We present our research that revolves around mathematical modeling and algorithms development in the area of computational biology, and more precisely, genome assembly as well as ancestral genome reconstruction and comparative genome rearrangement analysis. We start by demonstrating our results in the comparative genomics area by describing our work on the median problem of three genomes under the DCJ metric, as well as a more general problem of ancestral genome reconstruction of multiple input genomes. We then move to the problem of in silico genome scaffolding, where we present a novel method for for finishing incomplete genome assemblies and demonstrate the benefits of combining both areas of genome assembly and ancestral genome reconstruction. Lastly we present results of our work on the problem of comparing and merging of multiple scaffold assemblies of the same organisms.