Combi Seminars
Co-sponsored by the Department of Genomes Sciences and the Computational Molecular Biology (CMB) Program, the Combi Seminars focus specifically on developments in molecular and computational biology-related research and often feature UW faculty and researchers from regionally affiliated centers and institutes.
All Combi Seminars take place on Wednesdays from 1:30 - 2:30 in Foege Auditorium unless otherwise noted. | remote viewing option
compbio-seminars [ a t ] cs.washington.edu -- Biology seminar announcements from all around campus. Subscribe or unsubscribe at http://mailman.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/compbio-seminars
Please follow this link for a listing of past seminars. Some talks will be recorded and those links will be made available on the past seminars page for 2 weeks.
Spring 2024
5/8 - Dr. Karthik Shekhar | UC Berkeley
"The evolution of neuronal diversity"
held remotely | flier | talk will be recorded
Advances in DNA sequencing have been pivotal in illuminating the evolutionary history of genes. Recent breakthroughs in single cell profiling have motivated a related enterprise focused on the evolution of cell types, the functional units of complex tissues.
In this talk I will describe single cell analyses of cell type evolution in the retina, the thin film of neurons in the eye where vision begins. The retina is as complex as any other brain region, but its compactness and accessibility make it an ideal system to address conceptual and technical challenges associated with cell type evolution. I will discuss our recent integrative analysis of retinal atlases across 20 species, which suggest that many of the cell types and circuits thought to be unique to mammals have ancient evolutionary origins beyond the Devonian (>420 million years ago). As a specific case study, I will describe how an ancient substrate has massively expanded in the primate retina to enable vision at high spatial resolution. I will make some speculative connections between the co-evolution of the retina and the cerebral cortex, which has massively expanded in humans. Beyond furthering our basic understanding of the evolution of vision, these results have important implications for improving existing animal models for blinding diseases.
5/15 - Dr. Ali Shojaie | University of Washington
"Causal Discovery in Biological Systems"
flier | talk will be recorded
Estimation of high-dimensional directed graphs arises naturally in many biological applications, including the study of biomolecular systems using various -omics measurements. While several existing algorithms can be used for this task, these general-purpose algorithms do not account for features of biological networks and do not take advantage of the properties of biological networks and data. In this talk we discuss alternative algorithms that are specifically designed to take properties of biological networks and data into account and can offer reliable estimates under potentially less stringent assumptions.
5/22 - Dr. JT McCrone | FHCC
5/29 - reserved for postdoctoral research talks