2014-06-04

Prof. SUN Fengzhu gave a lecture named “Computational Approaches for Metagenomics Data Analysis” on May 29, 2014.

Metagenomics studies apply sequencing technologies to study the composition and function of microbes within their natural environments. Accurate estimations of alpha diversity, the composition of different organisms within a community and beta diversity, the comparison of different communities, based on enormous amount of sequence data from new sequencing technologies are essential problems in molecular ecology. He talked about his collaborations with marine biologists to develop computational approaches and applied them to the analysis of metagenomics data from the marine communities. Besides, he introduced three programs developed in his group.

1.Identifying local time delayed associations between microbial organisms (LSA),
2.Estimating abundance levels of organisms based on whole metagenome shotgun reads,
3.Comparing metagenomic communities based on k-tuples.

Dr. SUN Fengzhu is Professor and Head of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics within the Molecular and Computational Biology Program at University of Southern California (USC).He works in the area of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Statistical Genetics, and Mathematical Modeling. His research interests include protein interaction networks, gene expression, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP), linkage disequilibrium (LD) and their applications in predicting protein functions, gene regulation networks, and disease gene identification. He is also interested in metagenomics, in particular, marine genomics, and alignment-free sequence analysis. His previous research accomplishments include: 1) protein domain interaction and protein function prediction integrating multiple data sources, 2) dynamic programming algorithms for haplotype block partition and tag SNP selection, 3) 1-TDT: transmission disequilibrium test when one parent is available, and 4) theoretical studies of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) related biotechnologies.