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Keynote Speaker: Ming Li, Ph.D. Professor, Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics, Fellow, Royal Society of Canada, University of Waterloo

Title: "Modern Homology Search"

Abstract: Homology search, finding similar parts between two sequences, is the most fundamental task in bioinformatics. A large fraction of the world's supercomputing time is consumed by homology search. Traditional homology search technology is a heuristic science. The search algorithms are too slow and not sensitive enough. Many supercomputers are used to speedup such search and they still cannot satisfy the fast growing needs. In addition, the search results are simply many fragments of alignments. We introduce a mathematical theory of optimized spaced seeds that helps homology search to achieve high sensitivity and high speed simultaneously. This methodology is now serving thousands of queries daily, via BLAST and PatternHunter. The new technology also promises to achieve near Smith-Waterman full sensitivity search at faster than BLAST speed, and return structured gene matches instead of random fragment matches.

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