Technology developments have rapidly produced data that facilitates the emerging precision medicine research. In particular, high-throughput next-generation.
IEEE Bioinformatics and Biomedicine, 2015 International Conference on, Washington DC, November 9th -12th, 2015
Invited Talk: Developing systems genomics approaches to facilitate precision medicine research Dr. Mary Yang MidSouth Bioinformatics Center, Department of Information Science, George Washington Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology and Joint Bioinformatics Graduate Program of University of Arkansas at Little Rock and University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, 2801 S. University Avenue, Little Rock, Arkansas 72204 U.S.A. Email: mqyang [at] ualr.edu
Technology developments have rapidly produced data that facilitates the emerging precision medicine research. In particular, high-throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have brought unprecedented opportunities in translational genomics research. However, connection of the genomic and phenotypic information to cellular functions and disease mechanisms relies on the development of effective approaches at higher systems level. My Systems Genomics Laboratory and the MidSouth Bioinformatics Center aim to integrate different genomic data to study the mechanisms underlying initiation and progression of complex diseases such as cancer. In this talk, I will present our study of integrating gene expression profiles with protein interactions to identify cancer biomarkers and disease associated pathways. By further combing with genotype information, we discovered genetic mutations associated with poor survival rate in patients with ovarian cancer. Our integrative genomics research also incorporates the study of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs). We identified differentially expressed lncRNAs in cancer and revealed that many over-regulated lncRNAs were bidirectionally oriented with neighboring protein-coding genes. These protein-coding genes are enriched in biological processes implicated in cancer. The systems genomics approaches enable us to establish a computational framework to comprehensively identify biomarkers and dysregulated pathways, which will facilitate the precision medicine research.
Biography of the Speaker
Dr. Mary Yang is Associate Professor and Director of MidSouth Bioinformatics Center and Director of the Joint Bioinformatics Ph.D. Program of University of Arkansas Little Rock George Washington Donaghey College of Engineering & Information Technology and University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. After receiving her M.S.E.C.E, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University, she joined the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005. During her tenure at NIH, she contributed to various large-scale genomics and systems biology research projects. She was recruited by the University of Arkansas in 2013 to lead the joint bioinformatics program. Dr. Yang has been Founding Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design, a NIH PubMed fully indexed journal and is on editorial broads of Journal of Supercomputing and International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence. She served as a Steering Committee Member of NIH funded Arkansas INBRE. She has been the recipient of NIH Fellows Award for Research Excellence, NIH Academic Research Enhancement Award, Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship, Purdue Research Foundation Fellowship, IEEE and ISIBM Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Outstanding Achievement Awards, and Basic Science Research Award of Arkansas Science and Technology Authority (ASTA). Dr. Yang’s research is supported by NIH, FDA and ASTA. She has published over 100 research articles in computer science and biomedical sciences.
