This special focus is jointly sponsored by the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS), the Biological, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences Interfaces Institute for Quantitative Biology (BioMaPS), and the Rutgers Center for Molecular Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry (MB Center).
There is strong evidence that genes play a major role in susceptibility to all common human diseases. While linkage analysis has been very successful in finding the genes involved in Mendelian diseases such as Huntington disease, early onset Alzheimer's disease and cystic fibrosis, current interest has shifted towards mapping genes involved in diseases with complex etiologies such as diabetes and cancer, for which association studies have been shown to be more powerful. The workshop will bring together computer scientists, geneticists, and statisticians aiming to address current computational challenges in gene mapping, which include dealing with complex missing data patterns, multiple hypotheses testing, population substructure, gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. New directions of research, such as capturing the effects of structural genomic variation and using biological networks in whole-genome studies, will also be investigated.