Computer Science and Engineering, CSUSB
Visitting Speaker

Date May 22 2009 10:30-11:30 Place: JBH109

Title: An Overview of Bioinfomatics : From Genome Sequence to Personalized Medicine


Yate-Ching Yuan, PhD
Director of Bioinformatics Core Facility
Department of Molecular Medicine
Beckman Research Institute
City of Hope Medical Center


Bioinformatics, also known as system biology is a new interdisciplinary 
field of integrating life science and information science on the boundary 
between biology, computer science, statistics, and mathematics. Advances 
and fundamental changes in experimental genomics brought about by an 
avalanche of second generation genome sequences will pose challenges in the
computation speed and memory storage capability has fueled a new era in the
analysis of biological data. Current trend in bioinformatics at COH can be
classified into: (i) genomics – sequencing and comparative study of 
genomes to identify gene and genome functionality, (ii) proteomics – 
identification and characterization of protein function with three 
dimensional structure and reconstruction of metabolic and regulatory 
pathways, (iii) cell visualization and simulation to study and model cell 
behavior, and (iv) application to the development of drugs using computer 
assisted molecular modeling. In this talk, we will focus on our attempts in
building the analysis pipeline often involve series processes of 
experimental design, image preprocessing, QC, statistical clustering, 
filtering, annotation, and visualizations. Advanced information systems are
needed to comprehensively support a family of workflow-based frameworks for
conducting and addressing the specific challenges and needs of data mining
for an integrative translational research in personalized medicine.