CAREER: Models of Evolution and Discovery of Functional Elements in Mammals and Drosophila

Cornell Univ - State: Awds Made Prior May 2010, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

Cornell University is awarded a grant by the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program to develop new statistical models and algorithms for the identification of novel functional elements in the genomes of humans and eukaryotic model organisms. These new models describe both the structure and the evolution of functional elements, and will make full use of the large quantities of comparative sequence data and other high throughput genomic data that have recently become available. They will allow functional sequences to be identified by their evolutionary signatures, and at the same time will reveal aspects of the evolutionary history of the identified sequences. Software implementations will be developed and applied genome-wide to the latest mammalian and Drosophila comparative sequence data. Predicted elements will be browsable by the public in the UC Santa Cruz Genome Browser, and a subset of them will be tested experimentally. This research will be closely integrated with several educational goals, including the development of new undergraduate and graduate courses in computational genomics, the supervision and mentoring of students and postdoctoral associates, and the development of an already widely used collection of computer programs into a well-documented software package that is easy to use for students and other nonexperts.