Ph.D. Research Talk: Gene Set Temporal Differential Expression in Autism

Abstract

Gene expression experiments tell us what proteins a cellular population is currently producing - what it is doing at a particular point in time. Detecting differences in gene expression is an important problem, since these differences can inform us as to the presence of a disease or tell us which variety of a disease we are dealing with. We can also find sets of genes where significant differences between populations exist, which can inform us about how a disease functions or give hints about possible treatments. Some disorders are developmental in nature, and might involve a delay in development of some function or a disordered development of some system. We might expect these disorders to be related to functions that have a temporal pattern of gene expression, and to be linked with some disruption in that pattern. We develop a method to find and rank (functionally-related) sets of genes where this is the case, and we present results for an autism gene expression dataset.