报告题目： Identification of causal DNA methylation events driving cancer progression

报告人：Jiangwen Zhang , PhD Associate Professor/University of Hong Kong

报告人介绍:
Dr. Zhang graduated from Johns Hopkins University with PhD. He has worked at Harvard University Genome Center as Senior System Biologist for years before joining HKU in 2013. Dr. Zhang lab has broad interest in genetic and epigenetic regulation in development and diseases. Currently, his lab is focusing on epigenetic regulation of tumorigenesis. His lab employs high through-put ‘omics’ assays and large scale computation to dissect the gene regulatory network and signaling pathways involved in oncogenesis.
报告内容：
Both genetic and epigenetic factors are involved in oncogenesis. In order to identify the causal methylation alterations involved in oncogenesis, we propose a new method to infer the long-range epigenetic regulatory networks, such as (de)methylated enhancer with its gene targets. Our method is based on information theory, which can estimate the general dependence of random variables without making any assumptions about the nature of their underlying relationships. Therefore, it can be applied to many complicated fields, such as reverse engineering of gene regulatory network. Based on this theory, we have developed a software named MICMIC, Methylation network inference by conditional Mutual information based PC-algorithm, able to integrate multiple OMICs data and reconstruct complex gene network. After integrating the gene expression and DNA methylation data from TCGA samples, we have discovered many direct regulatory links between methylome and transcriptome with causal effect on cancer initiation and progression. The preliminary results indicate a promising future for this novel method in cancer systems biology.
时间：2016年11月14日（星期一） 下午 3：00-4：30
地点：8797威尼斯老品牌二楼会议室
邀请人：郭安源

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