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NJIT Mathematical Biology Seminar

Tuesday, September 29, 2009, 2:30pm
Cullimore Hall 611
New Jersey Institute of Technology

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Data Mining and Network Analysis in Systems Biology

Avi Maayan

Department of Pharmacology & Systems Therapeutics, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York

Cell signaling and gene regulatory networks are the focus of biomedical research because such complex systems control cellular behavior. In the past five decades, cell and molecular biologists have accumulated enormous amounts of knowledge about cell regulation; however, many components and details about interactions between cellular components, particularly in mammalian cells, are still largely unknown. Hence, we still do not have a holistic understanding of cellular regulation. There is a knowledge gap. Moreover, the rate of data accumulation resulting from emerging high-throughput biotechnologies has the premise to close this knowledge gap, but integrating data from multiple sources to extract real knowledge about regulatory networks and develop new hypotheses and new theories is a major challenge. To address some of these challenges, during this exciting phase in Biology, I will discuss how through research in my own laboratory, we have identified interesting global emergent properties observed in the topology of biological regulatory networks, collaborated with experimentalists on projects that combine computational predictions with experimental validation, and developed software tools to analyze proteomics and genomics experimental data.