What is needed is a systematics for the subcellular locations of proteins. Our group is working on the quantitative description of protein localization patterns using numerical features and the use of these features to develop classifiers that can recognize all major subcellular structures in fluorescence microscope images. Such classifiers provide a valuable tool for experiments aimed at determining the subcellular distributions of all expressed proteins. A key conclusion is that, at least in certain cases, these automated approaches are better able to distinguish similar protein localization patterns than human observers. Dannie Durand Yeast, a simple, single celled organism, has roughly 6000 genes while humans have 50,000 - 100,000 genes.
Yeast can make bread rise.
Human beings have invented the atom bomb and painted the Mona Lisa. Massive gene duplication, ranging from chromosomal segments to the entire genome, is believed to have played a crucial role in early vertebrate evolution. In the past, these processes have been poorly understood, but it is now possible to study these questions due to the recent availability of huge genomic data sets. In this talk, I will describe a computational approach to studying vertebrate genome evolution by exploiting the growing availability of diverse biological data via the World Wide Web, with an emphasis on the computer science research questions that arise in this work.