Visiting bioinformatics professor to give seminar tomorrow
Dr. Maido Remm, head of the Bioinformatics Department at the University of Tartu in Estonia, will give a seminar, "Microarrays for Genomic Studies," from 12:15 to 1:45 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 7, in Room 313, O'Shaughnessy Science Hall.
The seminar was organized by Graduate Programs in Software at St. Thomas in collaboration with the Twin Cities chapter of the IEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.
Within recent years the human genome as well as many other vertebrate genomes have been sequenced. This has generated a large amount of sequence data as well as opportunities for large-scale genomics studies. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and microarrays are commonly used for genomics studies. Renn will describe various applications of microarrays for genomics studies, such as genotyping microarrays, resequencing microarrays, species-identification microarrays and gene-copy number-measuring microarrays. The presentation includes a brief introduction to DNA probe and primer-design principles, and ongoing work in the field of DNA probe design will be described.
Remm, a molecular biologist, earned his Ph.D. in 1997, then spent several years in postdoctoral work in bioinformatics at the Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden, and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2001 and 2002 he led a bioinformatics group in the Asper Biotech biotechnology company.
Remm's current areas of research include PCR primer and microarray probe design, genetic analysis of variations in human genomes, and comparative genomics of bacterial genomes. His research has been cited frequently and published widely in scientific journals, including Nature, Genome Research, the Journal of Molecular Biology, Nucleic Acids Research, Bioinformatics, the American Journal of Human Genetics, and others.
Questions about the seminar may be directed to Dr. Cristian Domnisoru, associate professor in Graduate Programs in Software, (651) 962-5433.
