Electrical Engineering Systems Seminar

Next-generation DNA sequencing technology will help determine an individual's susceptibility to a broad range of chronic and acute diseases or disorders, enable the discovery and clinical testing of new pharmaceutical products, and generally personalize and improve the delivery of health care. In this talk, I will discuss the use of concepts from signal processing in the acquisition and analysis of next-generation sequencing data. Following a brief overview of state-of-the-art sequencing technology, I will present some recent results on modeling, optimal base calling, error correction, and analytical characterization of the achievable performance of sequencing-by-synthesis. The results demonstrate beneficial effects of the developed base calling and error correction techniques on downstream applications. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss signal processing aspects of real-time affinity biosensors which are capable of temporally sampling the process of binding between molecular targets and their probes. The results on modeling, inference, and limits of performance demonstrate significant performance improvements over conventional affinity biosensors.