My Thai
University of Minnesota
Date:
Monday March 13, 2006
Time:
Location: 225 Kalkin
Abstract
Pooling designs are used in DNA library screening to efficiently distinguish positive clones from negative clones, which are of fundamental importance in studying gene functions. The objective of a pooling design is to identify all positive clones from a given set of clones with the minimum number of tests. In the absence of experimental errors, a positive pool contains at least one positive clone and a negative pool otherwise. However, biological experiments usually contain errors. In addition, in some applications, besides positive and negative clones, there is a third category of clones called "inhibitors" whose effect is to neutralize positives. This talk will describe a novel design algorithm for non-adaptive pooling designs using the disjunct matrix approach in combinatorial group testing. This algorithm can identify all positive clones with the presence of inhibitors and errors in experiments.
More challenging, in a complex model, a positive pool may contain a positive complex, i.e., a subset of items rather than an individual item. This talk will also present an efficient algorithm for pooling designs in a complex model using the group testing in hypergraph. Furthermore, when a graph is a bipartite graph, this general construction can be used to identify the protein-protein interactions.
Short Bio:
My Thai received her B.S. degrees in both Computer Science and Mathematics majors from Iowa State University in 1999. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Minnesota in December, 2005. Her research interests are centered on the combinatorial optimization and its connection to Computer Networks and Computational Biology, including wireless networks, wireless sensor networks, group testing, and biological networks. She has published more than 15 research papers in various prestigious journals and conferences, such as IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, and INFOCOM conference. She is also an editor of the book, entitled "Advances in Wireless Sensor Networks." She is a member of the IEEE Computer Society.