Chaitanya Aluru will present his Pre FPO "Reconciliation based methods for Understanding Transcription Factor Evolution" on Thursday, May 27, 2021 at 3PM via Zoom. Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/91687324537 Committee: Examiners: Mona Singh, Yuri Prytikin, Barbara Englehardt Readers: Bernard Chazelle, Ben Raphael All are welcome to attend. Title: Reconciliation based methods for Understanding Transcription Factor Evolution Abstract: Regulatory networks are thought to underlie the biological differences between organisms. However, the evolutionary mechanisms by which these networks evolve is still an active area of research. Proteins called transcription factors form a central component of regulatory networks and are thought to evolve through repeated duplications and losses of functional subunits known as domains. Previous work has captured single duplication events, but fails to capture tandem duplications of multiple domains, a key evolutionary event in certain transcription factor families. In this talk, I will discuss two parsimony frameworks I have designed to incorporate tandem duplications. I will show how to write these problems as constraint satisfaction problems and find optimal solutions using ILPs. Finally, I will show example protein families in which our methods have successfully uncovered ancestral duplication patterns, and discuss future large-scale studies of zinc finger genes, the largest family of transcription factors in humans.