Ravi Sachidanandam, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY.

 "Splice Rack: Insights into splicing and evolution from
 a splice site database"
 
 Abstract:
 We recently built a curated collection of over half a million splice
 sites from  five species, H. sapiens, M. musculus, D. melanogaster,
 C. elegans and A. thaliana.  This has allowed us to infer properties
 of splice sites and the splicing machinery, that individual
 experiments would find hard to infer.
 
 I will take information on splicing from several genomes and use
 various numbers (the properties of introns/exons such as categories,
 counts and sizes) to dissect the biology. I aim to touch upon various
 details in collecting this information and the problems with common
 pattern recognition approaches to ab-initio prediction of the
 splice-sites. A variety of splicing phenomena will be addressed by the
 analyses, such as mechanisms of splice-site recognition, dynamics of
 the splicing reaction etc. In addition, the talk will concentrate on
 what the numbers say about the evolution of genes and the evolution of
 the splicing machinery and conclude with an inflationary model of the
 genome.