Speaker: Florian Potra, UMBC

Title: Protein Image Alignment via Quadratic Programming

Abstract: We present new algorithms for image alignment of two-dimensional polyacrylamide electrophoresis (2D-PAGE) gels. In contrast with previous approaches that considered only pairwise alignment, we consider algorithms for the alignment of a whole collection of gels. A synthetic gel, containing some "ideal landmarks" is constructed together with a family of transformations, so that for each gel from the collection there is a unique transformation that maps that gel into the synthetic gel in such a way that the gel's landmarks are mapped into very small neighborhoods of the corresponding ideal landmarks. Both the ideal landmarks and the family of transformations are obtained as the solution of a large-scale quadratic optimization problem which can be efficiently solved by interior-point methods. Optimal alignment of a family of 2D-gels is important in many proteomics studies, for example when replicate gels from both healthy and diseased subjects need to be collected and compared in order to assess the effects of different treatments.

Place: Science and Technology Building I, Room 242

Refreshments will be served before the talk at 3:00 p.m. in Room 222.

Department of Mathematical Sciences
George Mason University
4400 University Drive, MS 3F2
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
http://math.gmu.edu/
Tel. 703-993-1460, Fax. 703-993-1491