2001 Cornish Lecture
Date: Wednesday 19 September 2001
Speaker: Professor Terry Speed, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne & University of California, Berkeley
Title: Gene Expression
Abstract:
Most cells in any organism possess a full genome, and so in principle have the capacity to express every gene. By "express" here we mean transcribe to messenger RNA, process and translate to protein. The rate of expression of a given gene in a given cell or group of cells at a given time is highly controlled, and depends on many factors originating both inside and outside the cell or cells. In a natural way, cells differ from one another by their gene expression patterns, whether they be liver cells or brain cells or tumorous or normal skin cells.
In the last few years it has become possible to monitor the expression levels in cell samples of large numbers of genes simultaneously. This is done with what is known as microarray technology. An individual microarray experiment can yield information on the amount of RNA transcribed in each of 10,000 genes, and a single gene expression study can involve anything from 1 to 100s of such experiments. In my opinion, the explosion of data of this kind will give our subject its greatest boost for many decades, as the analysis and interpretation of microarray data is and will continue to be highly dependent on good statistical analysis. In this lecture I will describe some of the problems that arise in the microarray area, some of the solutions that exist, and some of the open problems.
Biography:
Professor Terry Speed is the leader of the Bioinformatics Group at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne (WEHI). His time is shared between research at the WEHI, and giving lecture courses at the University of Melbourne (Mathematics & Statistics Department) and the University of California, Berkeley (Department of Statistics).
Terry Speed's current research concerns the application of statistics to problems in genetics and molecular biology. These have provided many novel challenges of both an applied and a theoretical nature. His major interests within this area are in the mapping of genes in mice and humans, including disease genes and genes contributing to the variation of quantitative traits, and the statistics of production DNA sequencing. The Human Genome Project has been a stimulus for a number of the problems he has investigated with his students. Other areas of interest include the analysis of DNA and protein sequences, for example, the statistics of database searches and of finding genes in DNA sequences, and the analysis of microarray data. He is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Computational Biology. He was involved as an expert witness on the assessment of DNA evidence at the trial of O.J. Simpson.