Title: A revised view of the library of expressed mammalian genes

Brendan J. Frey
University of Toronto and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

Abstract: In the past 10 years, researchers have been trying to get a clear picture of how many protein-coding mammalian genes have yet to be discovered. Recent DNA microarray and SAGE experiments suggest that an unexpectedly large proportion of the genome is transcribed and may code for proteins. Using DNA microarrays and a carefully designed engineering tool based on artificial intelligence techniques, we have produced a revised view of the library of mammalian genes and their exons. In our work (published in Nature Genetics in Sep 2005), we survey the expression of 1.14 million DNA sequences from across the entire mammalian genome, in 37 different natural tissues. We find thousands of new transcribed DNA regions. However, our final conclusion is surprising and both closes a major chapter of genomics research and opens up several new avenues to explore.

Work done in collaboration with TR Hughes, QD Morris, N Mohammad, W Zhang, MD Robinson, S Mnaimneh, O Shai, R Chang, Q Pan, E Sat, J Rossant, BG Bruneau, JE Aubin and BJ Blencowe.

Biography: Brendan J. Frey is a faculty member in Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research, at the University of Toronto. He was born on August 29, 1968, in Calgary, Alberta near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where he enjoyed hiking and camping with his family. In 1979, he started writing computer programs, attaching sensors to his home computer, and building simple robots. His university education was in the areas of physics, engineering and computer science, culminating with a doctorate from Geoffrey Hinton's Neural Networks Research Group at the University of Toronto. From 1997 to 1999, Frey was a Beckman Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he continues to be an adjunct faculty member in Electrical and Computer Engineering. From 1998 to 2001, he was a faculty member in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Currently, Frey is head of the PSI-Group at the University of Toronto. He has received several awards, given over 80 invited talks and published over 100 papers on advanced computer algorithms, molecular biology, computer vision and iterative decoding. More information is available from his research group's website, http://www.psi.toronto.edu.