The plenary lecture on November 14, 2005 will be given by Dr. Terry Gaasterland.

Title: Regulating the regulators: variations and silencing in transcription factor genes

Transcription factors (TFs) are DNA-binding proteins that work in protein complexes to activate or repress transcription of genes. Through comparative analysis of expressed sequence data from human, mouse and rat we show that alternative splicing modifies TFs in both DNA-binding domains and in co-factor binding domains. The comparative analysis allows the prediction of variant forms of TFs across the 3 genomes as well as assessment of tissue specificity of TF variation.

Another post-transcriptional mechanism to control the production of TF proteins is through naturally occurring microRNA molecules. MicroRNAs bind to spliced mRNAs and inhibit translation or trigger mRNA degradation. We have predicted 83 new microRNAs and their target mRNAs in Arabidopsis and 43 new microRNAs in sea squirt.

This talk will discuss both mechanisms for regulating transcription factors.

Terry Gaasterland is Professor of Computational Biology at the University of California, San Diego and the Director of the Scripps Genome Center at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Before her position in San Diego, she was Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Computational Genomics at The Rockefeller University in New York City. She holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Russian from Duke University (1984) and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland (1988 and 1992, respectively). From May 1984 to January 1988, she worked as a software engineer for Texas Instruments. After completing her doctoral studies, Dr. Gaasterland held a DOE Enrico Fermi Fellowship in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, and after two years was promoted to Assistant Scientist. In January 1995, she also became an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Gaasterland has received numerous awards and fellowships in recognition of her research. These have included the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (1999-2002), the Burroughs-Wellcome New Investigator Award (2000-2003), the Presidential Early Career Award in Science & Engineering (2000), New York's "40 under 40" in 2002, and the New York City Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science in 2003. She has been an Associate in the Evolutionary Biology Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research since 1996.