The January 2007 issue of Genome Technology magazine named Center for Computational Molecular Biology Assistant Professor Ben Raphael to their annual "Tomorrow's PIs" list.
Raphael received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2002 and joined the Brown faculty in September. In the past year Raphael and his colleagues published a paper in Genome Research titled, “Decoding the fine-scale structure of a breast cancer genome and transcriptome.” The study demonstrated advantages of end sequence profiling to map the rearrangements of tumor genomes using the MCF-7 breast cancer cell line; those include the ability to generate tumor-specific reagents for in vitro and in vivo studies as well as detection of rearrangement and copy number changes.
Raphael's other research focus is producing algorithms to address DNA and protein sequencing problems, such as multiple sequence alignment and motif finding. He recently helped to develop a new method for multiple sequence alignment called A-Bruijn Alignment. According to Raphael, ABA is an improvement upon similar algorithms for multiple sequence alignment because it permits the alignment of sequences with self-similar or shuffled subsequences.
The 30 selected researchers, who are peer nominated, must be involved in the disciplines that comprise systems biology and within five years of their first faculty or equivalent post.
www.genome-technology.com
