NLM DIR Seminar Schedule

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Scheduled Seminars on Jan. 20, 2022

Speaker
Brian Ondov
Time
3 p.m.
Presentation Title
Feeling lucky: Borrowing web search technology to accelerate genomics
Location
Building 38A - B2 NCBI Library

Contact NLMDIRSeminarScheduling@mail.nih.gov with questions about this seminar.

Abstract:

Since a genome is essentially a document written in the alphabet of nucleotides, the field of Computational Biology has been informed by Natural Language Processing techniques since its inception. In this talk I will describe how "MinHash", a relatively obscure algorithm developed for searching the web, has been transformative for the task of genomic similarity estimation. I will go into how and why the algorithm works for sequences of nucleotides and amino acids rather than natural language documents, and I will discuss the creation and validation of tools employing the algorithm, variations for different kinds of searches, and the range of applications it can help with.