Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering

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MS THESIS PRESENTATION

 

Paralog specific gene copy number discovery within segmental duplications

 

Emre Doğru
MS Student
(Supervisor: Asst. Prof. Dr. Can Alkan)
Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent University

With the advancing technology in genome sequencing and analysis, it has become evident that the structural variations are the main source of alteration in human genome. Despite their significance in understanding disease susceptibility, there is no algorithm yet to find all types and sizes of structural variations at once. Structural variation discovery remained problematic since they often overlap with the segmental duplications, nearly identical segments of DNA that appear more than once in the genome. Researchers often excluded these regions that made up ~5% of the genome because of the complexity it brings to their studies. Only few of them are working in these regions, however, they require a special sequence alignment file where reads are mapped to multiple locations.

In this study, our aim is to discover structural variations in repeat- or duplication-rich regions using a sequence alignment file with unique mapping. We utilize the singly unique nucleotides (SUN) that distinguish paralogs from each other in the sequence alignment of the duplicated regions. Our method is based on read depth and is limited to detect only duplications and deletions. We computed the absolute copy numbers of genes using only read depth of SUN. Furthermore, we also computed the paralog specific absolute copy numbers for genes residing in the same segmental duplication.

 

DATE: 13 September 2019, Friday @ 10:00
PLACE: EA-409