MS in Bioinformatics and Comp Bio, Iowa State U, 2008
PhD Student
My background is computer engineering and now I am a bioinformatics and computational biology PhD student. I’m especially interested in gene regulatory networks (GRNs). GRNs can be defined this way: The node of GRNs is a gene, the input of the node is the transcription factors and the output of the node is gene expression. In other words, a collection of DNA segments in a cell that interacts with each other and with other substances in the cell. The expression of each gene is determined by the expression of other genes and environmental conditions. These dynamics also depends on some parameters, and the parameters are features of each gene in the network. I want to put the gene duplication concept into gene regulatory networks because the evolutionary mechanisms that create gene regulatory networks are not well understood and gene duplication is one way to add new genes to genomes. I plan on describing models using SBML (Systems Biology Markup Language) and I applying simulated annealing algorithms to find parameters that maximize network performance. I can then explore the consequences of gene duplication for the functioning of a gene regulatory network.
Contact Information:
Kyoungmin Roh
3203 LSB
EEMB Dept, UC Santa Barbara
