URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2018_Melissa-McCarthy

Big Data Projects

Project: Calculating Differences Among Genomes to Understand Evolution

Researchers: • Rachel Schwartz, assistant professor, biological sciences • Noah Daniels, assistant professor, computer science and statistics • Yara Hrytsenko, graduate student, computer science and statistics

About: By examining patterns in the differences among genomes, Rachel Schwartz hopes to better understand how species can change over evolutionary time. The existing methods for analyzing data from genomes were not designed to enable the type of comparative research Schwartz is conducting. “It’s not the way people planned to process this data,” she says. “And it pushes us into some pretty complex calculations.” Schwartz collaborates with Daniels and Hrytsenko in the Department of Computer Science and Statistics to develop algorithms to compare genomes efficiently. Daniels is also developing methods to visualize these comparisons, which occur in multi-dimensional space, in a way humans can work with. Ultimately, Schwartz would like to apply these novel approaches to understand both fundamental processes in evolution, and how genomes change when they become cancerous.

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Schwartz hopes to better understand how species can change over evolutionary time.

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