Dept. of Mathematics Colloquium • Creighton University • March 22, 2019
Abstract: DNA is often called the blueprint for life because it encodes the information needed for our cells to function. A major way that DNA carries information is by encoding information needed to make proteins, a process called gene expression. However, it has been found that only a small fraction of DNA (about 1.5%) actually contains information to make proteins. What then does the rest of DNA do? A prevailing hypothesis is that much of DNA is involved in regulating its own expression. The fact that so much of DNA might fill this role makes testing these hypotheses a major focus in molecular biology research. In this talk, I’ll discuss a relatively new biological assay that has been developed to test these hypotheses and the statistical methodology that we have developed to analyze data from these assays.