RAONNE BARBOSA VARGAS
Identification of Regulatory Elements using Comparative Genomics and Phylogenetic Footprinting
Abstract:
"With the complete compilation of several genomic sequences, understanding the regulation of gene activity has become one of the primary goals for the Molecular Biology community. This research has the objective of identifying regulatory elements of human genes using Phylogenetic Footprinting. All the biological data used comes from NCBI databases(HomoloGene, EntrezGene, EntrezNucleotide), differently from other similar studies. Interesting computational methods and tools were applied during the process, such as String Multiple Alignment to help find great candidates for regulatory elements, and Clustering to group them together and extract information from their similarity among each other. Finally the clusters are compared to known annotated regulatory elements from the Transfac database to confirm true positives on our results and to help indicate which discovered regulatory elements might be novel. A complete program was created in python to perform all the steps of this solution automatically and at once."
Full Thesis(BSc Dissertation) (PDF, in english):
Paper (PDF, in english):
Results Webpage (in english): Research Results
Advisor: Dr. Berilhes Borges Garcia
Examination Board:
Final Mark: 10.0 (from 0 to 10)
Presentation(Defense): August 11th 2006