Graduate Student / Postdoc Seminar

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A brief introduction to some problems in bioinformatics

Speaker: Aaditya Rangan, Courant Institute, New York University

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Friday, February 14, 2025, 1 p.m.

Synopsis:

In this talk I'll give an overview of some of the kinds of problems typically encountered when analyzing genetic data. I'll talk about the types of data collected (e.g., gene-expression, single-cell RNA sequencing, and single-nucleotide polymorphism data) as well as the typical pipelines used to analyze this data in the context of complicated diseases (e.g., psychiatric diseases such as bipolar disorder). The original hope was that diseases such as these could be (mostly) explained by finding a single dominant genetic precursor. However, it is currently believed that many of these diseases (including bipolar-disorder, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease and others) are 'heterogeneous' in nature. A heterogeneous disease may manifest multiple (perhaps hidden) subtypes, each with potentially independent genetic drivers. I'll touch on some of my recent attempts to identify heterogeneous genetic structure in this context, pointing out plenty of opportunities for future research.