Associate Professor Jean Yang

The University of Sydney

Jean Yang is currently an Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Sydney. She completed her doctoral studies in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research work has centered on the development of statistical methodology and the application of statistics to problems in genomics, proteomics and biomedical research. In particular, her focus is on developing methods for integrating expression studies and other biological metadata such as miRNA expression, sequence information and clinical data.

Using network information in analysis gene expression data

Large-scale molecular interaction networks are dynamic in nature and changes in these networks, rather than changes in individual genes/proteins, are often drivers of complex diseases such as cancer. In this talk, I use data from stage III melanoma patients provided by Prof. Mann lab that comprise of clinical, mRNA and miRNA data to discuss how network information can be utilise in the analysis of gene expression analysis to aid in biological interpretation. I will also present an R software package, Variability Analysis in Networks (VAN), that enables an integrative analysis of protein-protein or microRNA-gene networks and expression data to identify hubs (i.e. highly connected proteins/microRNAs in a network) that are dysregulated, in terms of expression correlation with their interaction partners.