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SUMMARY:Nested Sampling for Motif Discovery - Thomas Down\, Sanger Institu
 te
DTSTART:20050517T130000Z
DTEND:20050517T140000Z
UID:TALK4330@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Phil Cowans
DESCRIPTION:Many key processes in molecular biology\, including transcript
 ion and alternative splicing\, are regulated by short sequence motifs whic
 h serve as specific binding sites for protein factors. Building a comprehe
 nsive catalogue of such motifs is an important step towards understanding 
 gene regulation. A number of methods have been developed which apply stati
 stical and learning techniques to discover likely functional motifs from b
 iological sequences. However\, such techniques have generally been aimed a
 t discovering one motif at a time from small amounts of sequence data\, an
 d they have generally suffered from limited sensitivity.\n\nNestedMICA is 
 a new motif-discovery program which aims to address these issues. It uses 
 a mixture model which allows the simultaneous discovery of many motifs in 
 a single run. It also applies a new inference technique called Nested Samp
 ling which allows very complex model-spaces to be explored in a principled
  manner\, giving substantially better sensitivity than previously describe
 d heuristic methods.\n\nNestedMICA has been tested on several large sets o
 f non-coding genomic sequence from the fruitfly\, Drosophila melanogaster.
  In this talk\, we present results which we believe represent a significan
 t part of the flys core regulatory vocabulary\, and discuss strategies for
  analysing and validating large sets of candidate motifs. 
LOCATION:Ryle Seminar Room\, Cavendish Laboratory
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