Spring Seminar Series - April 6, 2006
University of Minnesota
School of Statistics
College of Liberal Arts

Statistical Matching and Alignment in Protein Bioinformatics

Kanti V. Mardia
Senior Research Professor
University of Leeds, UK

Thursday, April 6, 2006
3:30 PM, 115 Ford Hall
Minneapolis, East Bank Campus
Social at 3:00 PM, 300 Ford Hall

Abstract

Among the challenges for statistics posed by proteomics are various alignment and matching problems. Here we consider matching protein gels in 2 dimensions,and aligning active sites of proteins in 3 dimensions. In the latter case, we also want to use information related to the grouping of the amino acids. We introduce hierarchical Bayesian models for matching configurations of points in space, where the points are either unlabelled, or have at most a partial labelling constraining the matching, and in which some points may only appear in one of the configurations. We derive procedures for simultaneous inference about the matching and the transformation, using a Bayesian approach (Green and Mardia, 2006). Our procedure is compared to other methods such as a graph theoretic method (Gold, 2003) and EM algorithm (Taylor, Mardia and Kent, 2003; Kent ,Mardia and Taylor,2004).

Implementation and performance of these methods on the proteomic tasks is described, and we discuss some open problems and suggest directions for future work.