C. Titus Brown, assistant professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Engineering and Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Michigan State University, will present “Genomics without a Reference: Dealing with Sequence Data from Ecologically and Evolutionarily Interesting Organisms” on Monday, April 23 from 12:20 to 1:20 p.m. in the Cox Science Center, Room 166.

Brown is interested in taking advantage of next-generation sequencing data, such as Illumina, for the purpose of studying non-model ecosystems and organisms. However, working on short-read data in the absence of reference genomes and transcriptomes is challenging. In collaboration with microbial ecologists and evolutionary developmental biologists, his group has developed several computational approaches to help them move from raw sequence towards biological hypothesis. For his talk, Brown will discuss their computational approaches through two vignettes: studying microbes in the soil with metagenomics, and analyzing dramatic morphological change in a pair of sea squirt species with mRNAseq.

For more information about this event, please contact William Browne at [email protected].