Speaker: Pan-Jun Kim, University of Illinois

Title: Sociology in the genetic world: What we can learn from microbial genetic co-occurrence

Date: 11/21/2011

Time: 11am

Room: Informatics East 122

Abstract: The phenotype of any organism on earth is, in large part, the consequence of interplay between numerous gene products encoded in the genome, and such interplay between gene products may affect the evolutionary fate of the genome itself through the resulting phenotype. In this regard, contemporary genomes can be used as molecular fossils that record successful associations of various genes working in their natural lifestyles. By analyzing thousands of orthologs across ~600 bacterial species, we constructed the map of gene-gene associations conserved across much of the sequenced biome. In addition to the biochemical and phylogenetic properties, we elucidate the global organization of this gene association map, in which various modules of genes are strikingly interconnected by antagonistic crosstalk between the modules. Our approach infers functional coupling of genes regardless of mechanistic detail, and may guide exogenous gene import in synthetic biology to engineer a cell for desired bioproduct production.