COLLOQUIUM University of South Carolina Department of Computer Science and Engineering Combinatorial and Statistical Approaches in Gene Rearrangement Analysis Jijun Tang Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Date: February 11, 2011 (Friday) Time: 1430-1520 (2:30-3:20pm) Place: Swearingen 2A31 Abstract Rearrangement of genes under reversal, transposition, and other operations is known to be an important evolutionary mechanism and has attracted much interest from evolutionary biologists and comparative genomicists. Compared to DNA sequence data, rearrangement events are mathematically much more difficult, since many problems that are simple for DNA sequence data become NP-hard for rearrangement events. With continuous efforts from mathematicians, computer scientists and biologists, many new and exciting improved results have been achieved during the past decade. In this talk, I will give a detailed overview of gene rearrangement research and introduce several combinatorial and statistical methods that can accurately and efficiently compute large scale rearrangement events, along with experimental results on both simulated and biological datasets. At the end of this talk, I will also discuss some open problems. Jijun Tang is an Associate Professor in Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. His research is focused on phylogenetic analysis from genome rearrangement and sequence data. His main research interests include computational biology and bioinformatics, algorithm development and high performance computing; other research interests include computer game development and engineering simulation. Dr. Tang received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of New Mexico in 2004. Since joining the University of South Carolina in August 2004, Dr. Tang's research has been supported by NSF, NIH, ONR and the University of South Carolina.