Robi D. Mitra, Ph.D.

DEPARTMENT OF Genetics
Keywords: functional genomics, systems biology, technology development, bioinformatics

My lab is interested in two questions. How can we utilize the wealth of knowledge obtained by sequencing the human genome to better understand, diagnose and treat human disease? Can we improve our understanding of cellular processes by taking a quantitative, systems approach to collecting and analyzing biological data?

To address the first question, we are developing polony technology -- a technology for rapid, low-cost analysis of nucleic acids (see below). We are using this technology to collect genotype, haplotype, and sequence information from patient DNA in order to understand the genetic factors that cause predisposition to disease. Using the same technology, we are investigating the mechanisms by which pharmaceuticals cause side effects.

To address the second question, we are performing computational analyses on genome-wide expression data to understand transcriptional and biochemical networks in the yeast S. cerevisiae. To accelerate our progress in building these quantitative models, we are developing technologies for the absolute (molecules per cell rather than fold-change) quantification of mRNA, as well as high-throughput quantification of protein levels. We hope that an integrated genomic, proteomic, and computational approach will answer questions about the connectivity, structure, and robustness of biochemical and genetic networks in yeast.