Join Dean Schlesinger and the Whiting School community at the Don P. Giddens Inaugural Professorial Lecture recognizing Ben Langmead as a professor in the Department of Computer Science.
Description of “Moving From Strength to Strength: Full-Text Indexes for Pangenomes”:
When Langmead began graduate school, new DNA sequencers were producing data so rapidly that sequence alignment algorithms could not keep up. His work drew on the Burrows–Wheeler Transform (BWT) to build genome “indexes” small enough to fit in memory yet fast enough to keep pace. Since then, the BWT has become the foundation for numerous sequence analysis methods.
Today, genomics is entering a new era. Instead of relying on a single human reference genome, we now have hundreds—and soon thousands—of high-quality human genomes. Used effectively, these “pangenomes” can improve analyses by reducing reference bias: the tendency of alignment algorithms to give inaccurate results in regions that differ from the reference.
To fully realize these benefits, we must move beyond single-reference approaches and develop methods that consider many genomes at once. Fortunately, the BWT is the perfect basis for making this next step. This talk will explain what the BWT is, why it has been effective for DNA sequencing data, and how his group is extending BWT-based methods to index and analyze ever-larger pangenomes.
Learn more about Ben Langmead here.
Register for the event here.