Research Talk: Connecting Human Diseases to Specific Gene Sets

Abstract

Understanding the relationship between genes and disease is one of the most important aims of the biological sciences. However, due to its ambiguity and inconsistency, studied biological data sometimes fails to lead scientists to appropriate experimental design and novel findings. As one of the efforts to overcome this hardship, we looked at the biological data with a fresh view to discover potential relationships for further experimental validation. Considering a pre-defined set of genes as an entity, we introduce a new method for identifying disease categories enriched for that gene set. By applying this method to regulatory and developmental gene sets, we have made interesting observations that have strong potential for further development of treatments and prediction of side effects. In this talk, I am going to talk about the underlying idea, implementation, results of the project, and highlight some observations that have strong potential for novel findings relating genes and disease.