MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

0-1 Laws for Single Molecules

Bud Mishra
Professor of Computer Science & Mathematics Courant Institute, New York University

Tuesday, February 29, 2000
4:00 PM (reception following)
Room 35-225
LIDS Colloquium

Abstract

Single molecule methods (e.g., optical mapping, molecular combing, fluorescent flow cytometry, ion channels, etc.) for genomics and proteomics rely on the statistical properties of a large number of identical molecules. We will use ideas from probabilistic methods to show existence of 0-1 laws governing the behavior of the group of molecules and how we exploit it in devising powerful algorithmic and automation tools to create restriction maps and sequence information from parsimonious and noisy data from single DNA molecules.

The set of tools underlying our "Computational Optical Mapping Project" have been used in making clone maps (BACS and cosmids, Y-DAZ locus), microbial genomic maps (P. falciparum, D. radiodurans, E. coli, etc.), and a partial human genome map.