21/9/2012

Thesis defense of Emre Guney: "Role of network topology based methods in discovering novel gene-phenotype associations"

On Tuesday, 25th of September, Emre Guney, member of the Structural Bioinformatics Group of GRIB (IMIM-UPF) will defend his thesis at 11:00 in the Auditorium of PRBB.

Abstract:

The cell is governed by the complex interactions among various types of biomolecules. Coupled with environmental factors, variations in DNA can cause alterations in normal gene function and lead to a disease condition. Often, such disease phenotypes involve coordinated dysregulation of multiple genes that implicate inter-connected pathways. Towards a better understanding and characterization of mechanisms underlying human diseases, here, I present GUILD, a network-based disease-gene prioritization framework. GUILD associates genes with diseases using the global topology of the protein-protein interaction network and an initial set of genes known to be implicated in the disease. Furthermore, I investigate the mechanistic relationships between disease-genes and explain the robustness emerging from these relationships. I also introduce GUILDify, an online and user-friendly tool which prioritizes genes for their association to any user-provided phenotype. Finally, I describe current state-of-the-art systems-biology approaches where network modeling has helped extending our view on diseases such as cancer.