Analyzing Genomes Beyond Sequences

When: Friday, October 10, 
2014
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Prof. Jijun Tang, University of South Carolina

Host: Prof. Zhigang Deng

Spatial conformation and interaction of chromatin play a fundamental role in important cellular functions.  With the influx of new data about the higher-level structure of genomes, new techniques are required to model, visualize and analyze the full extent of genomic information in three dimensions.  We recently developed the first model-view framework to integrate, model and visualize human genome in 3-dimension.  Here we report a new method on 3D genome model construction and a prototype of cloud based Genome3D viewer.  Our viewer uses high performance, cross-platform game engine that enables efficient rendering of human genome model in 3-dimension on Windows and Mac platform, which demands less computing power and makes 3D structural genome information available to a broad research community through web browser.  The integrated model-view framework could significantly advance genome research in integrating epigenomic data, studying long range inter- and intra-chromosome interaction, and analyzing structural features of genetic variations.

Bio:

Dr. Jijun Tang received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of New Mexico. He is currently an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina. His research interests include high-performance computing, algorithm development, computational biology and computer games. In the past years, Dr. Tang’s research was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and Office of Naval Research (ONR).