Dr. Françoise Seillier-Moiseiwitsch, 19 March 2007
Analysis of Two-Dimensional Gel Images

ABSTRACT: Two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis is currently one of the techniques of choice to separate and display all the proteins expressed in a tissue. In the resulting protein maps for groups of patients, we seek to identify proteins that are differentially expressed. I will describe a comprehensive analytical approach that deals with preprocessing, alignment and differential analysis. Preprocessing removes the bulk of the background noise. It involves smoothing, selecting regions containing spots and gradient thresholding. Images are aligned using cubic-spline transformations. The alignment is formulated as a quadratic programming problem that is optimized using an interior-point method. Wavelets are then utilized to summarize the
aligned images, and statistical tests performed on the wavelet coefficients. These novel statistical tests were developed with the experimental design and the low sample size in mind.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: Françoise Seillier-Moiseiwitsch, M.S., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and Oncology. She obtained her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in statistics from the University of London (U.K.). Prior to taking up her position as Director of the Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics in the Department of Oncology and Director of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Shared Resource at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, she was a tenured Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the Director of the Bioinformatics Research Center at the University of Maryland,  Baltimore County. She is trained as a mathematical statistician and has been working in the area of statistical genetics and bioinformatics for over ten years. She has long-standing collaborations with genetic epidemiologists and virologists. Her research interests are in statistical methodology for genomics, functional genomics and proteomics. While at the University of North Carolina, she developed a postdoctoral program with a pharmaceutical company to help biologists acquire quantitative skills. Her research funding has been continuous since 1989 and includes grants (National Science Foundation, American Foundation for AIDS Research, National Institutes of Health, Pediatric AIDS Foundation) and contracts (Pfizer Central Research, LabCorp of America).