Quantitative Analysis of Higher Order Chromatin Interactions

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The Program in Quantitative Genomics (PQG) at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health will host the 2017 conference, "Quantitative Analysis of Higher Order Chromatin Interactions", November 2-3, 2017 at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. This is the eleventh in a very successful conference series on emerging statistical and computational issues in genetics and genomics. The impetus for this year's theme comes from the increasing amount of data that provide information on the nuclear organization of the human genome and its applications. A series of "chromatin confirmation capture" techniques, such as Hi-C, have been developed for identifying three-dimensional interactions between all pairs of genomic loci at once. Profiling such three-dimensional interactions is critical for a full understanding of gene regulation. With increasingly refined technology and decreasing sequencing costs, it is now possible to generate high-resolution datasets with close to a billion sequencing reads, on the same order as human whole-genome sequencing. The scientific community is on the verge of generating massive amounts of Hi-C and related types of data. The conference will deal with key aspects in analyzing and interpreting these large and complex datasets. The conference is open to the whole research community and particularly encourages participation of junior faculty and researchers, postdoctoral fellows, students, and women and minorities. The participants will discuss and critique existing quantitative methods, discuss in-depth emerging statistical and quantitative issues, and identify priorities for future research in the analysis of higher order chromatin interaction data. The research presented will be broadly disseminated in publications in scientific journals and websites. The conference will focus on the following three topics of critical importance in quantitative analysis of higher order chromatin interaction data: (1) emerging technologies; (2) computational challenges in high order chromatin data; and (3) applications to basic biology and disease mechanisms. A key feature of the conference is to provide a timely and interactive platform for cross-disciplinary senior and junior investigators, including statistical geneticists, computational biologists, and biologists, to discuss these analytic challenges. For more information, visit https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/2017-pqg-conference/.