SysGen Seminar – Alistair Forrest – 9th June, 2017

Al Forrest
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Andrew Siebel

asiebel@unimelb.edu.au

T: +61 3 8344 0707

Alistair Forrest

Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research

Friday 9th June
12-1pm
Agar Theatre, Building 147 (BioSciences 4 - Old Zoology), The University of Melbourne

Insights from cell specific transcriptomes

Abstract
The FANTOM5 project used Cap Analysis of Gene Expression (CAGE) to systematically map promoter and enhancer elements in the human and mouse genomes. The first phase of the project profiled a broad collection of primary cell types, tissues and cancer cell lines, to generate steady state ‘snapshots’ of these elements. In the second phase we studied multiple time courses of stimulation and differentiation, to identify elements that are dynamically regulated. Here, I will describe some recent insights using the FANTOM5 data to study cell-to-cell communication networks, disease gene prioritization and our newest works on long non-coding RNAs and microRNAs.

Bio
Professor Alistair Forrest is the inaugural Cancer Research Trust Senior Fellow and head of the systems biology and genomics lab at the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, University of Western Australia. He also holds a visiting senior scientist position at RIKEN Japan. He is an expert in transcriptomics and led the international FANTOM5 consortium in Japan to global maps of human promoters, enhancers, long non-coding RNAs and microRNAs. These are landmark resources that are being used world-wide to build transcriptional regulatory networks, understand the effect of regulatory variant polymorphisms and for identifying cancer biomarkers. He was awarded the 2016 Eureka Prize for Excellence in International Scientific Collaboration and the 2016 Millennium Science mid-career award at Lorne Genome. His lab is currently using bioinformatic and genomic approaches to study the relationship between tissue specific expression and tissue specific disease phenotypes, ligand-receptor mediated cell-to-cell communication in cancer and to build enhancer aware transcriptional regulatory network models.

Enquiries: Andrew Siebel (asiebel@unimelb.edu.au)