Jiuyong Li: Exploring microRNA and mRNA Interactions and their Roles in Diseases in Data

Guest lecture

Jiuyong Li: Exploring microRNA and mRNA Interactions and their Roles in Diseases in Data

2 September at 13:15
Room B222, Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki

Abstract:

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play important roles in many biological processes. One major role is as a regulator of genes, and dysfunction of miRNA regulations cause diseases, including cancers. Computational approaches have been used to determine the functions of miRNAs in data. Previous work has mainly focused on the identification of miRNAs and their target genes. However, to understand the regulatory mechanisms of miRNA in complex cellular systems, it is essential to discover miRNA and mRNA functional modules involved in complex interactions between miRNAs and their target genes. In this talk, I will briefly introduce computational methods for the discovery of miRNA and mRNA regulatory modules, and then discuss three methods for the discovery developed by us. The first method discovers miRNA-mRNA regulatory modules by identifying their associations within specific conditions. The second method uncovers miRNA-mRNA interactions by Bayesian networks. The third method adapts a newly developed information retrieval method, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, to model interactions between miRNAs and mRNAs. All three methods have been used for real biological data analysis and discovered some interesting results. The first two methods have been published in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and BMC Bioinformatics.

Bio:

Dr Jiuyong Li (John) is an association professor at the School of Computer and Information Science of University of South Australia. He is currently visiting the Department of Computer Science of Helsinki University sponsored by Nokia Foundation. His research interests are in data mining, biomedical informatics, and data privacy. He has published a number of papers in leading journals and conferences in the areas. He has led projects supported by Australian Research Council. One of his developed methods has been applied to a few real world medical applications. His recent work is mainly on discovering miRNA and mRNA regulatory modules from real world matched miRNA-mRNA data and privacy preserving data medical publishing.