Please join us for the 2012 UC Berkeley / UC Davis Joint Statistics Colloquium will be held on Thursday, May 3^rd at the Mathematical Sciences Building, UC Davis.

Date:                         Thursday May 3, 2012

Location:                   Mathematical Sciences Building 1147 (Colloquium Room), UC Davis

Seminar Time:          4:10 pm

Please join us at 3:30pm in the Statistics lounge (MSB 4110,4^th floor) for refreshments.

Speaker:                    Rasmus Neilsen

Dept of Integrative Biology & Statistics, UC Berkeley

Title:                           Statistical Problems in the Analysis of Next-Generation Sequencing Data

Abstract:                  The biological sciences have been transformed by the emergence of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies providing cheap and reliable large scale DNA sequencing. These data allow us to address biological research questions that previously were considered intractable, but also raise a number of new statistical and computational challenges. The data contain errors that need careful attention, and the appropriate likelihood functions are usually not computationally accessible, because of the size of the data sets. I will discuss some solutions to these problems and illustrate them in the analyses of several different data sets. In one study we sequenced all protein coding genes of 2000 individuals to identify mutations associated with Type 2 Diabetes. In a second project we used similar sequencing techniques to identify the genetic causes of altitude adaptation in Tibetans. In the third study I will discuss, we sequenced the first Aboriginal Australian genome to elucidate the history and origins of Aboriginal Australians.