UNM Graduate Student Sushmita Roy spent last summer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the lab of Manolis Kellis, an assistant professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who specializes in developing computational algorithms for decoding the information present in the genomes of organisms.
Photo: Graduate Student Sushmita Roy
As part of her internship, Roy played a small part in a large project analyzing the genomes of 12 fly species. The paper describing the project and its results was released this week in the journal “Nature.”
In her summer project, she analyzed statistical properties of the fly regulatory network, computationally predicted by Kellis’ lab, with nodes representing genes and edges representing regulatory control exercised by a “regulator” gene on a “regulate” gene.
This led to the identification of network nodes with different types of connectivity. Nodes with high-connectivity were themselves regulators controlling important events in the growth and development of flies.
Roy says the edges in the network also had non-random properties. Edges had a higher chance of existing between genes functioning in the same fly tissue, rather than in different tissues.
The identification of these statistical properties helped the researchers to clarify the biological significance of the predicted regulatory network of developing flies, which can provide insight into important developmental events in higher organisms.
The title of the journal article is “Discovery of Functional Elements in 12 Drosophila Genomes Using Evolutionary Signatures.” Roy is listed as one of the co-authors on the article.
Roy is working on her Ph.D. in Computer Science applying statistical algorithms to understand living systems. Her advisors, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Terran Lane and Professor of Biology Margaret Werner-Washburne are guiding her efforts to apply statistical algorithms to understand living systems.
Her internship in the MIT summer program was sponsored by the Program in Interdisciplinary Biological and Biomedical Sciences (PIBBS) at UNM and (Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Interfaces program and was arranged by Bruce Birren, director of the Microbial Sequencing Center and co-director of the Genome Sequencing and Analysis program at the Broad Institute at the MIT and UNM Biology Professor Margaret Werner-Washburne.
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu