<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color: #000000'>Sasha Koruga will present his MSE thesis talk on Wednesday May 8 at 4PM in <br>room 402. The members of his committee are Olga Troyanskaya (advisor) and <br>Kai Li. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below.<br><br><hr id="zwchr"><div style="color:#000;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;"><b></b><br>
<div dir="ltr"><div><p class="">A biological pathway can be modeled as a network of sparsely
connected proteins, where network paths correspond to a sequence of
protein-protein interactions leading to higher-level changes within the cells
in the human body. A deeper understanding of how proteins interact to carry out
biological goals can lead to insights in human disease research and the
proposal of new drug targets. However, the number of pathways we currently
understand is limited, and these pathways are incomplete. Although experimental
evidence for many protein interactions and protein-pathway affiliations exist
in research literature, only relatively few have been manually curated.</p>
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<p class="">We propose using crowd-sourcing to aggregate published
biological research in order to construct new pathways and augment existing
ones. We hope to use these pathways to enable accurate prediction of yet more
pathway components and drug targets based on functional genomics data. We
developed a web application (<a href="http://bioturk.princeton.edu" target="_blank">http://bioturk.princeton.edu</a>) where untrained
users can answer simple biological questions by using their ability to
deconstruct sentences. By deciphering sentences from PubMed, these users will
help us support biomedical research. At the same time that the users learn more
about biology and biological pathways involved in disease, our approach can
also leverage participation by expert biologists. These biologists are given
contested questions, have their answers up-weighed, and utilize an expert user interface that allows them to provide corrections to the pathways.</p><br></div></div></div><br></div></body></html>