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Statistical Mechanics in Systems Biology: Villa Orlandi, Anacapri ~ May 29 - June 1, 2012 |
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Anna Tramontano Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza Universita' di Roma (Italy) The computational analysis of the human genome: old and new problems Determining the identity and function of all of the sequence elements in human DNA is a daunting challenge. The more we study the genome and the more data we gather, the more unexpected features we find. Perhaps the most surprising result of the analysis is that many transcribed elements are apparently unconstrained across mammalian evolution and can be neutral elements that serve as a reservoir for natural selection. Several of these transcripts are originated by alternatively spliced RNA. Understanding if they are actually translated in functional proteins is not a trivial problem, but structural analysis of their putative products and interactions is a powerful method to assess the likelihood of them being functional and therefore computational biology is called upon to shed light on these intriguing aspects of the genome. One of the challenges is in the ability to scale up existing or newly developed methods and make them sufficiently fast to be applicable at a genome scale as well as to integrate the information at various levels. I will describe the steps that we are taking in this direction. |
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