Prof. Tolga Can will give a seminar on “Alternative Polyadenylation (APA) events as biomarkers in cancer” on 22 November at 13:40. The abstract of the talk and a short bio is shared below.

Bio:
Dr. Tolga Can is currently a faculty member in the Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara. His research interests are computational systems biology, biological networks, and graph theory. Specifically, he uses/develops bioinformatics approaches for cancer research.

Abstract:
Alternative polyadenylation (APA), a hidden complexity in cancer transcriptomes, is a process observed in recent cancer studies. In this talk, I will describe the tools we developed in collaboration with Erson Lab of METU Biological Sciences for the identification of APA events. I will also report some of the results we obtained using these tools. Specifically, we analyzed publicly available expression data for 1045 cancer patients and found a significant shift in usage of poly(A) signals in common tumor types (breast, colon, lung, prostate, gastric, and ovarian) compared to normal tissues. Using standard machine-learning techniques, we further defined specific subsets of APA events to efficiently classify cancer types. Overall, our study offers a computational approach for use of APA in novel gene discovery and classification in common tumor types, with important implications in basic research, biomarker discovery, and precision medicine approaches.