Abstract

Modern sequencing technologies are facilitating the exploration of functional elements of the genome at resolutions previously not possible. This technology is allowing in-depth and comprehensive investigations of populations of RNA transcripts, non-coding RNAs, protein-DNA interactions and epigenetic regulatory events across the genome. Robustly detecting and comparing these functional events within and across genomes presents substantial challenges due to the presence of substantial data generation biases and complexities in reliably classifying equivalent events. This talk will discuss some of these challenges, analytical approaches currently being deployed to begin to address these and the progress to date in translating these large sequence datasets into a deeper understanding of genome function.