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COE Technology Week 2002 Focus Seminar
Organised by
Recent Advances in Bioinformatics and
Computational Biology 8 March, 2.00pm - 5.00pm
LT8, Level 2, North Spine
BioInformatics Research Centre
Introduction to BIRC Research A/P Jagath C.
Rajapakse Deputy Director, BIRC, Nanyang
Technological University
Applications of Metaheuristics in Bioinformatics
Dr Kuo-Bin Li BioInformatics Institute
1345 Registration   1400 Introduction to BIRC
Research A/P Jagath C. Rajapakse Deputy
Director, BIRC Nanyang Technological University
1410 Some Sample Problems and Solutions in
Post-Genome Knowledge Discovery A/P Limsoon
Wong Institute for Infocomm Research 1440 The
Fugu Genome at the Verge of a New Bioinformatics
Explosion Mr Elia Stupka Fugu Informatics,
IMCB 1510 Refreshments   1530 Getting Your
Data-Driven Life Sciences Research Up and Running
Mr Amey V. Laud HeliXense Pte
Ltd 1600 Applications of Metaheuristics in
Bioinformatics Dr Kuo-Bin Li BioInformatics
Institute 1630 Multimodality as a Criterion for
Feature Selection in Unsupervised Analysis on
Gene Expression Data Dr Li Yi Genomics
Institute of Singapore   1700 End

Research at BIRC aims at the design and
development of algorithms and tools to store,
analyze, and visualize biological data. Current
research projects are in structural and
functional genomics, neuroinformatics and medical
informatics, data visualization, mining, and
integration, and grid computing. This talk will
briefly outline some projects presnetly carried
out at BIRC  
Many bioinformatics applications involve
combinatorial search over a large solution space.
For example, multiple sequence alignment whose
aim is to find the optimal alignment of a group
of nucleotide or protein sequences is a
combinatorial optimization problem.
Metaheuristics are approaches that guide local
heuristic search procedure to explore the
solution space beyond local optimality. Examples
of metaheuristics include genetic algorithm,
simulated annealing and tabu search. With the
advent of powerful distributed or parallel
computers, new bioinformatics algorithms making
use of metaheuristics will hopefully be able to
produce quality results within reasonable amount
of time. A few recent applications will be
discussed.
Some Sample Problems and Solutions in
Post-Genome Knowledge Discovery A/P Limsoon
Wong Institute for Infocomm Research
Multimodality as a Criterion for Feature
Selection in Unsupervised Analysis on Gene
Expression Data Dr Li Yi Genomics Institute of
Singapore
Informatics has helped in launching molecular
biology into the genomic era. It appears certain
that informatics will continue to be a major
factor in the success of molecular biology in the
post-genome era. In this talk, we describe
advances made in data mining technologies that
are relevant to molecular biology and biomedical
sciences. In particular, we discuss some recent
research results on topics such as (a) the
prediction of immunogenic peptides, (b) the
discovery of gene structure features, (c) the
classification of gene expression profiles, and
(d) the extraction of protein interaction
information from literature.

One important way that gene expression data is
often analyzed is to cluster the samples without
reference to any annotation about them. Before
clustering, the data is often subjected to a
feature selection preprocessing step, in which a
subset of genes is chosen for further analysis.
We examine the use of multimodality as a
criterion for choosing genes in feature
selection, and compare its use with variance,
which is more commonly used at present. Both are
compared when used in conjunction with an
algorithm that clusters the samples in different
ways, based on different subsets of the genes.
The key idea of this algorithm is to cluster
genes using as a similarity measure the mutual
information between partitions on the samples
obtained by clustering the samples using the
individual genes being compared.
The Fugu Genome at the Verge of a New
Bioinformatics Explosion Mr Elia Stupka Fugu
Informatics, IMCB
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The completion of the Fugu genome marked an
important event for bioinformatics the
completion of the first of many vertebrate
genomes to be studied after the human genome was
unveiled in 2001 which in turn has opened the
doors to comparative genomics. In this talk I
will discuss our work on the Fugu genome as well
as on comparative genomics in the wider sense,
the informatics challenges that it poses as well
as the biological discoveries it facilitates
Free Admission All are Welcome