Manolis Kellis, MIT
"Regulatory network discovery and evolution"
First part of the talk was comparative genomics techniques for short regulatory motifs. Since motifs are small ~8bp and degenerate this is hard without comparative techniques.
Genome wide motif discovery by looking for over represented n-mers. They did an apparently simple counting technique that seemed to work well.
Promoter motifs are symmetrically conserved in both forward and reverse strand. This is not true for 3'-UTR motifs (which is coordinate with their role in post transcriptional modification.
3-UTr are usually ~8 long and end in A which alludes to miRNA them being miRNA targets. Scanning the miRNA database confirms this.

went back and looked for miRNAs that are complements for the 3-utrs they find. They select for those that form stem loops, in total they find 258 candidates of which 114 confirm known miRNA genes. Estimate that 20% of human genes are targeted by miRNA.

Use full genome duplication as a model for network evolution using motif based networks. Duplication in yeasts (K. waltii and cerevisiae) , pufferfish and even human (plos 2005).
Duplicated genes show accelerated divergence and that in 95% of theses cases on copy evolves faster than the other.
Using a simple scheme for modeling interactions gain/loss they can model the motifs of interactions in duplicated genes.
Noted that paralogs are more likely to interact with each other. This may be due to proximity or redundancy.