Abstract: Interpreting genetic variance (including SNP and structural variant) is the key to precision health. Most of these variants will affect disease risk, response to drugs or other traits such as height in a tissue or condition specific way. How can we figure out which variants affect the function and regulation of genes in which condition? We propose to use gene regulatory network to integrating omics data and interpret genetic variants. Particularly, we will discuss the models and algorithms to organize, analyze, model, and integrate the genetic variant, DNA accessibility data, transcriptional data, and functional genomic regions together. We believe that the integrative paradigm on chromatin and expression levels will eventually help us to understand the information flow in cell and will influence research directions across many fields.

About the speaker: Yong Wang is Professor at the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science (AMSS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He is also a joint faculty member in the National Center for Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Sciences (NCMIS), Chinese Academy of Sciences and Center for Excellence in Animal Evolution and Genetics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his Ph.D. degree in Operations Research and Control Theory from AMSS of CAS in 2005. His current interest is in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology. He develop diverse computational methods ranging from theory, model, and algorithm to elucidate the relationship between sequence variant, regulatory element, regulator, gene expression, and evolution of biomolecular systems, to probe design principles of biological regulations and networks, and to investigate systems biology mechanisms of complex traits (http://wanglab.amss.ac.cn).