Computational and Systems Biology Summer Institute
Iowa State University

Research Projects for Fellows, 2009
P14: Develop a correlative measure of expression pattern between human and pig genes to add evidence of functional orthology to structure-based orthology

Short Title:	Develop a correlative measure of expression pattern between human and pig genes to add evidence of functional orthology to structure-based orthology
Mentors:	PI: Chris Tuggle
Description:	Approach: 1. Obtain affy data for presence/absence of expression of gene X in human tissue Y (there are several databases on-line with this information); repeat for porcine genes/data. There is now at least 25 pig tissues with public Affy data (a set of 12 tissues was recently published). 2. Compute correlation between patterns of qualitative expression. 3. Compare level of correlation to level of sequence similarity. Identify examples of gene families for which the expression data identifies the true ortholog among alternatives equally similar at the sequence level. We could also find evidence of probeset-based expression differences correlated with specific human gene variants; depends on what time is available. 4. Add this information to AnexDB gene pages.
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References:
Suitable background skills:	Student has to use some data-gathering skills, some computation and some biological inference.