Events

Recent advances in next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have provided us with an unprecedented opportunity to better characterize the molecular signatures of human cancers. One hallmark of cancer genomes is aneuploidy, which engenders abnormal copy numbers amongst broadly connected sets of alleles. Structural variations (SVs) further modify the aneuploid cancer genomes into a mixture of rearranged genomic segments with extensive somatic copy number alterations (CNAs).

Palindromes or inverted repeats in a genome sequence are a pair of complementary sequences that appear in reverse order. If the two complementary halves appear in tandem, the sequence is referred to as a palindrome; if the two halves are separated by intervening base pairs, they are referred to as an inverse repeat. The location and length of palindromic sequences in the genome may alter DNA replication and gene expression that may lead to genomic instability.

Outbreaks of infectious diseases such as influenza, SARS, and Ebola pose significant threats to human health.  Early detection and characterization of outbreaks are crucial to containing and managing them.  I will describe previous work on a system that processes emergency department reports for individual patients, computes probabilities of individual diseases, and builds epidemiological models of outbreaks.  I will also describe current research to extend this work to cover multiple, simultaneous outbreaks of influenza and influenza-like illnesses.  The extension to mu