Pedro Mendes
Virginia Bioinformatics Institute

Functional genomics, the large-scale measurement of the concentration of gene products and metabolites, has become a mainstream activity in molecular biology. Functional genomics arose from the genome sequencing efforts, when it became clear that over half of all genes discovered were of unknown function.  The rationale behind functional genomics is to carry out detailed observations of the molecular state of cells to distinguish the effect of mutations on such genes.

In this presentation I will introduce functional genomics and the data it produces, and current methods of analysis. I will then describe results from our laboratory which point to ways of using functional genomic data to the reconstruction of biological networks and dynamics. I will conclude by discussing the role of machine learning in the
analysis of functional genomics data.