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Abstract: The five human acrocentric chromosomes (13, 14, 15, 21, and 22) are hypothesized to recombine in a non-homologous way resulting in distal regions that are not chromosome specific. Here, we extract segmental duplications from the distal regions of human acrocentric chromosomes, build multiple sequence alignments, and infer phylogenetic trees. The phylogenetic trees show evidence of recombination between heterologous chromosomes. This work began as a summer internship project with Dr. Adam Phillippy at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH.
Speaker #2: Soyoung Park (PhD student, UMD Mathematics Department)
Title: Mathematical assessment of the roles of vaccination and Pap screening on the incidence of HPV and related cancers in the Republic of Korea
Abstract: Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is a major sexually-transmitted infection that causes various cancers and genital warts in humans. In addition to accounting for about 99% of cervical cancer cases, it significantly contributes to anal, penile, vaginal, and head and neck cancers. Although HPV is vaccine-preventable (and highly efficacious vaccines exist for preventing infection with some of the most oncogenic HPV subtypes in the targeted population), the disease continues to cause major public health burden globally (largely due to inequity in access to the main control resources (i.e., access to Pap smear and vaccination) and low vaccination coverage in most communities that implement routine HPV vaccination). This talk is based on the use of a new mathematical model (for the natural history of HPV, together with the associated neoplasia) for assessing the combined population-level impacts of Pap cytology screening and vaccination against the spread of HPV in a heterogeneous (heterosexual and homosexual) population. The model, which takes the form of a deterministic system of nonlinear differential equations, will be calibrated and validated using HPV-related cancer data from the Republic of Korea. Theoretical and numerical simulation results will be presented. Conditions for achieving vaccine-derived herd-immunity threshold (for achieving HPV elimination in Korea) will be derived.