NLM DIR Seminar Schedule
UPCOMING SEMINARS
RECENT SEMINARS
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June 30, 2026 Jaya Srivastava
Disrupted Regulation of Essential Genes Mediates Dementias and Age-Associated Disorders -
June 11, 2026 Angela Jiang
Identification and Evolutionary Analysis of Steroid-Metabolism Enzymes in Gut Microbes -
June 10, 2026 Luda Diatchenko
New Insights on Pain Biology from Human Transcriptomics: How Stimulation of Immune Response Shapes Pain Resolution -
June 9, 2026 Pascal Mutz
Characterization of covalently closed circular RNA replicators detected in (meta)transcriptomic data -
June 4, 2026 Madeleine Clore
Explaining why AlphaFold struggles to predict mutational effects
Scheduled Seminars on Jan. 20, 2022
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.