Pavel Pevzner
Ronald R. Taylor Professor of Computer Science
University of California, San Diego
Thursday, October 7, 2004
3:10-4:00 p.m.
1065 Kemper
A welcoming reception and refreshments for Pavel Pevzner will be available before the talk at 2:45 in 1131 Kemper Hall.
Abstract:
Despite some differences in appearance and habits, men and mice are genetically
very similar. In a pioneering paper, Nadeau and Taylor, 1984 estimated
that surprisingly few genomic rearrangements (about 200) have happened
since the divergence of human and mouse 75 million years ago. The genomic
sequences of human and mouse provide evidence for a larger number of rearrangements
than previously thought and shed some light on previously unknown features
of mammalian evolution. In particular, they provide evidence for extensive
re-use of breakpoints from the same relatively short regions and reveal
a great variability in the rate of micro-earrangements along the genome.
Our analysis also implies the existence of a large number of very short
"hidden" synteny blocks that were invisible in comparative mapping
data and were ignored in previous studies of chromosome evolution. These
results suggest a new model of chromosome evolution that postulates that
breakpoints are chosen from relatively short fragile regions that have
much higher propensity for rearrangements than the rest of the genome.
Biography:
Pavel Pevzner holds the Ronald R. Taylor Chair in Computer Science. He
joined the UCSD faculty in 2000, following five years in the University
of Southern California's Mathematics and Computer Science departments.
From 1992-95, he was an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University,
where he was affiliated with both the Biotechnology Institute and the
Institute for Molecular Evolutionary Genetics. From 1990-92 Pevzner was
a postdoctoral researcher at USC. He received his Ph.D in 1988 from the
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Pevzner is the author of the
book "Computational Molecular Biology: An Algorithmic Approach"
(MIT Press, 2000) and also "Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms",
co-authored with Neil Jones (MIT Press, 2004). He is an executive editor
of the "Journal of Computational Biology," and Chair of the
Steering Committee of the International Conference on Research in Computational
Biology (RECOMB).