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Computer Science Colloquia

The Human Genome Project, along with the advances in laboratory technology, has created an enormous wealth of data and vast opportunities, but it has also imposed a challenge to our ability to process and understand the information. In this talk I shall address some of the problems, with particular emphasis on issues in eukaryotic gene regulation. The quest to understand it has given rise to a wide range of computational approaches, and there is a growing consena wide range of computational approaches, and there is a growing consensus that comparative genomics methods are the most promising of all. I shall outline some of my earlier work on the use of sequence conservation in the search for potentially functional DNA segments, and the algorithms based on the Hamming distance between the sequences, minimal number of substitutions along the phylogenetic tree and region closure. This research has recently been extended to the study of mammalian Hox gene clusters. I shall present some of the work in progress concerning multiple alignment fragmentation and the assessment of differential phylogenetic footprints in Hox.