2013-2014 Colloquium

Speaker: Dr. Jie Chen, Professor and Chair of Department of Mathematics and Statistics at University of Missouri - Kansas City
Title: Change Point Models for the Detection of DNA Copy Number Variations
Date: Friday, November 8, 2013
Time: 2:30 - 3:30
Room:  RB 2042

Abstract: DNA copy number variations (CNVs) correspond to chromosomal aberrations and are indications of the abnormality of a cell. To study the genetic reasons of tumour growth, cancer formation, and genetic diseases, researchers now use advanced technologies, such as the comparative genomic hybridization (CGH), the array-based comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH), and the next generation sequencing (NGS), to conduct DNA copy number experiments for detecting CNVs. Identifying boundaries of CNV regions on a chromosome or a genome can be viewed as a change point problem of detecting signal/intensity changes presented in the genomic data.  The analysis of high throughput genomic data for possible changes has become one of the most recent applications of statistical change point analysis.  This type of statistical analysis is evidently crucial in cancer research, clinical diagnostic applications, etc.   In this talk, I present some new change point detection algorithms for the identification of CNVs using both the aCGH data and the short sequencing reads data resulting from the NGS technology.