Dr. Keith Pecor and Dr. Jia Tao, TCNJ
November 24, 2015
12:30 – 1:30pm
SCP-101
*Refreshments will be served
Dr. Keith Pecor, Department of Biology
“Chemical Stimuli and Geographic Distributions”
Abstract: Freshwater animals use chemical stimuli in a variety of contexts, such as resource acquisition and predation avoidance. In my presentation, I will discuss two separate projects in which my research students and I assessed responses to predation risk stimuli by freshwater crustaceans, large and small. The case will be made that the responses observed help to explain the current geographic distributions of the species studied.
Dr. Jia Tao, Department of Computer Science
“Shared Genetic Architecture In Autoimmune Disease – A Preliminary Analysis”
Abstract: Traditionally, disease classifications have focused on characterizing diseases based on sets of related symptoms/phenotypes. However, as our understanding of genetic contributions to disease susceptibility and progression evolves, we start noticing that diseases with similar symptoms may have completely different causes. As genetic data becomes more highly available, it becomes possible to classify diseases based on their genetic causative drivers instead of their phenotypes. In this study, we have (1) explored the relationship between 10 autoimmune diseases along with type II diabetes based on their genetic susceptibility information and compared such classifications to existing disease categorizations based on disease symptoms/phenotypes from Human Phenotype Ontology, NCI-thesaurus and the Disease Ontology, and (2) developed automated scripts to compute similarities and cluster diseases based on the specified criteria. Categorization based on genetic susceptibility can help identify diseases that share similar drug targets and benefit from similar diagnosis technologies. We hope to further develop our system to apply it to more disease categories.
