----------------------------------------------------------------------- BIOINFORMATICS COLLOQUIUM College of Science George Mason University ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Chemometrics approach to modeling siRNA gene silencing and receptor-based SAR Weifan Zheng NCCS Abstract: Chemometrics approach has been widely employed in cheminformatics to study QSAR (quantitative structure activity relationship) of drug molecules. In this talk, I will describe how PLS (partial least square) and SVM (support vector machine) modeling can be used to study the gene silencing potency of siRNAs. A couple of new ways to characterize the structures of siRNA molecules will be introduced that have made possible the quantitative modeling of chemically modified siRNAs. I will also describe the application of PLS and computational geometry in receptor-based QSAR modeling of drug activities.