Gene Expression Analysis

From time to time, our students deserve an introduction to specific topics in statistics taught in a way that they, even without a statistical background, can learn and appreciate. This topics course is the most suitable venue for this. Each Topics course will be offered on an experimental basis. If a topic is determined to be integral to the needs of the student population, we will submit a new course proposal after the second time the same topic is offered. In bioinformatics, a sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA, or protein to identify regions of similarity that may be a consequence of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. In turn, these relationships have consequents for new insights in medicine, epidemiology, psychology, sociology, and in the social sciences. Many observers have note the flood of new sequencing data every day means that analysis, let alone intepretation, of the data falls ever further behind. Statistical tools a major part of the solution to these issues. This course will cover: the processes by which the observations of a sequence made; the statistical methodology (multivariate analysis of binary data) by which significant sequences are identified; and the implications that follow from this identification.