Indian Statistical Institute

P.C. Mahalanobis Memorial Lectures

Maps of Variability in Cell Lineage Trees

by

Professor Terry Speed

Walter & Eliza hall Institute of Medical Research, Australia

Professor Terry Speed completed a B.Sc. (Hons) in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne, Australia and a Ph.D. in Mathematics and a Diploma in Education at the Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

He held appointments at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia, and the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and with the CSIRO in Canberra, Australia. In 1997 he took up an appointment with the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Australia, where he is now an Honorary Fellow in the Bioinformatics Division. Earlier he was the lab head in the same division. Professor Speed has supervised around 70 research students.

In 1989, Professor Speed was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He also held the Office of the President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2004. In 2002, he received the Pitman Medal. In 2009, he was awarded the NHMRC Australia Fellowship. In 2013, he received the Australian Prime Ministers Prize for Science. Professor Speed was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2013.

His research interests lie in the application of Statistics and bioinformatics to genetics and genomics, and related fields such as proteomics, metaolomics and epigenomics, with a focus on cancer and epigenetics.

Professor Speed is regarded internationally as THE expert on the analysis of microarray data.

Lecture

Date      :      13th February, 2019 (Wednesday)

Time      :      2.00 pm - 3.00 pm

Title       :      Maps of Variability in Cell Lineage

Trees

Abstract

Recent approaches to lineage tracking have allowed the study of differentiation in multicellular organisms over many generations of cells. Understanding the phenotypic variability observed in these lineage trees requires new statistical methods. An invariant cell lineage, such as that for the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, can be described by a lineage map, defined as the pattern of phenotypes overlaid onto the binary tree. However, this lineage map is static and does not describe the variability inherent in the cell lineages of higher organisms. Here, we introduce lineage variability maps which describe the pattern of second-order variation in lineage trees. These maps can be undirected graphs of the partial correlations between every lineal position, or directed graphs showing the dynamics of bifurcated patterns in each subtree. We infer these graphical models for lineages of any depth from sample sizes of only a few pedigrees. This required developing the generalized spectral analysis for a binary tree, the natural framework for describing tree-structured variation. Lineage variability maps thus elevate the concept of the lineage map to the population level, addressing questions about the potency and dynamics of cell lineages and providing a way to quantify the progressive restriction of cell fate with increasing depth in the tree.

The lecture will be held in Second Floor Auditorium.

All are welcome.