Computer science colloquia: Mukul Bansal, MIT
| Date/Time: | Thursday, 21 Apr 2011 at 3:40 pm |
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| Location: | B29 Atanasoff |
| Cost: | Free |
| Phone: | 515-294-6516 |
| Channel: | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences |
| Categories: | Lectures |
| Actions: | Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder |
Understanding and unraveling the evolutionary processes that have created and shaped all living organisms is one of the most fundamental problems in all of biology. One such evolutionary process is Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT), in which genes are transferred between two organisms that do not share an ancestor-descendant relationship. HGT plays an important role in bacterial evolution by allowing them to transfer genes across species boundaries; for example, HGT is responsible for the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes from one bacterial species to another. In this talk, I will describe a computational framework that enables the efficient detection of large-scale horizontal gene transfer events. Such large-sale HGTs point towards major events in evolutionary history and their systematic detection will help improve our understanding of the effects and dynamics of horizontal gene transfer and enable us to infer past symbiotic and ecological associations that shaped the evolution of organisms.
Bansal's research areas are in computational biology and bioinformatics in general, with a particular focus on phylogenetics and comparative genomics. Bansal received his Ph.D in computer science from Iowa State in 2009, under the advisement of ISU professors David Fernandex-Baca and Oliver Eulenstein.