University of Houston
Department of Computer Science

In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science

Adhish Raj Gupta

will defend his thesis
Computational Analysis of Over-represented Sequences in Microbial Genomes

Abstract
Significantly over-represented short subsequences (sequences present in many more copies than is to be expected under the random assumption) in microbial genomes have been reported to have a role in DNA repair, recombination, and regulation of transcription. The biological function of many of such sequences, however, remains unclear. In order to perform a rigorous study of all over-represented sequences, new algorithms were developed and applied to 200+ complete microbial genomes to identify each over-represented sequence’s location as well as its bias to appear in coding, non-coding, complementary to the coding, etc. regions. As a result of this analysis, subsets of over-represented sequences were identified that are specific to several microbial families in addition to subsequences with a strong bias to be located in different regions of genomes.

Date: Friday, May 12, 2006
Time: 9:30 AM
Place: 550-PGH

Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Yuriy Fofanov