[talks] J Farnham preFPO
Melissa M. Lawson
mml at CS.Princeton.EDU
Wed Apr 3 09:25:41 EDT 2013
Jesse Farnham will present his preFPO on Friday April 12 at 9AM in
Room 302 (note room!). The members of his committee are: Mona
Singh, advisor; Olga Troyanskaya and Andrea LaPaugh, readers; Vivek
Pai and Tom Funkhouser, nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend
his talk. His abstract follows below.
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"Organization and function acquisition in cellular networks"
A main goal of biology is to understand the functional organization of
organisms. In this thesis, we apply computational techniques to large,
noisy biological datasets such as protein-protein interaction (PPI)
networks and expression microarrays in order to elucidate principles of
how genes in PPI networks acquire new functions and contribute to the
overall functional organization of life. First, we investigate the
functional organization of PPI networks by presenting a metric,
functional insularity, that quantifies the degree to which a protein
interacts with other proteins of similar function. We find high
variation in insularity values, and we identify several differences
between high- and low-insularity proteins. Secondly, we investigate
function acquisition by human genes by identifying changes in
protein-protein interactions, gene expression, and other markers of
function as genes age. Our results indicate the presence of a tradeoff
between modularity and connectivity in PPI network organization;
furthermore, our results suggest that young genes acquire new functions
gradually as they age, allowing the functional organization of the cell
to evolve over time.
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