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.
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.
Autumn 2019
October 16 -
October 23 - Dr. Trevor Bedford
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Friday, October 25 - Dr. Ferhat Ay
La Jolla Institute for Immunology
UC San Diego
2:00, Health Sciences K-069
"Identifying distal enhancer-promoter interactions in human immune cells from proximity ligation data"
The field of regulatory genomics has recently witnessed significantly increased interest in the three-dimensional structure of DNA in the nucleus, catalyzed by the development of chromosome conformation capture techniques (e.g., Hi-C, HiChIP) that profile genomic proximities on a genome-wide scale. Systematic analysis of these proximities is particularly important to identify targets of disease-associated genetic variants, more than 90% of which reside in noncoding regions with unknown gene targets. Our lab works on developing computational methods to understand the role of human genetic variation in gene regulation through various epigenetic mechanisms, and in particular, through chromatin structure. I will talk about our work in assigning statistical confidence estimates to HiChIP data in order to determine putative functional loops between regulatory elements in our DNA (FitHiChIP, Nature Communications, 2019). I will then present results from our unpublished work, in which we apply FitHiChIP to HiChIP profiles of 5 different primary human immune cell types from 6 different donors to revisit the functional roles of GWAS SNPs in immune-mediated diseases. This data allowed us to propose a novel way of mapping expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) leading to the discovery of promoter-interacting eQTLs (pieQTLs) including disease-risk variants that are megabases away from their target promoter and overlap specific enhancers as validated by CRISPRi assays. We also discovered promoter regions that act as enhancers to other genes and validated their activity and cell-type specificity using CRISPR. Our work provides insights into genotype-dependency of gene expression and the cell-type restriction of such dependencies.
October 30 - Dr. Wenying Shou
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
November 6 - Dr. Michael Hawrylycz
Allen Institute
November 13 - Dr. Georg Seelig
University of Washington
November 20 - Dr. Arvind Subramaniam
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
December 4 - Dr. Larry Ruzzo
University of Washington
Winter 2020
January 8 - Dr. Jesse Bloom
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
January 15 - Dr. Cole Trapnell
University of Washington
January 22 - Dr. Neda Bagheri
University of Washington
January 29 - Dr. Mary Kuhner
University of Washington
February 5 - Dr. Phil Bradley
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
February 12 - Dr. John Mittler
University of Washington
February 19 - Dr. Elizabeth Thompson
University of Washington
February 26 - Dr. Kelley Harris
University of Washington
March 4 - Dr. Nathan Price
Institute for Systems Biology
March 11 - Dr. Frank DiMaio
University of Washington
Spring 2020
Spring Quarter sessions are reserved for postdoctoral research talks.
April 1 -
April 8 -
April 15 -
April 22 -
April 29 -
May 6 -
May 13 -
May 20 -
May 27 -
June 3 -
June 10 -