*Dissertation Defense Announcement:
To:  The George Mason University Community*

*Robert E. Brown
PhD Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Candidate
*
*Date:   Thursday April 7, 2011
Time:   11:00 a.m. 
Place:  George Mason University
** 	     Occoquan Bldg. Room 203
	     Prince William campus <http://www.gmu.edu/resources/visitors/findex.html>
  
Dissertation Chair: Dr. Patrick Gillevet
Committee members: Dr. Donald Seto, Dr. Jeffrey Solka, Dr. Dmitri Klimov*
*Title: "Systems Modeling of the Oral Metabiome"*

The dissertation is on reserve in the Johnson Center Library, Fairfax campus.The doctoral project will not be read at the meeting, but should be read in advance. 

/**/All members of the George Mason University community are invited to 
attend.

/ABSTRACT:/

Deciphering the underlying biological processes comprising the Human 
Oral Metabiome is important to the understanding of Human 
Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) disease.  The National Institute of Health 
has launched the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) to accelerate research 
and discovery techniques for five microbiome sites on the human body.  
Knowledge discovery techniques are needed to point researchers to 
follow-on hypotheses to quickly pinpoint areas of great promise.   We 
developed the Differential Correlation Network (DCN) as a technique for 
researcher's to perform knowledge discovery in the oral mycobiome 
field.  Using data from the Oral Microbiome, Differential Correlation 
Networks were applied to metabolites, bacteria, and fungi sampled from 
12 Controls and 12 HIV Patients.  By analyzing 100's of features across 
disease vs. control classes, statistically significant feature pair 
differences are captured and presented in Cytoscape.  Several 
interesting differences are discovered and their possible biological 
significance is presented.   The Systems model in conjunction with known 
biological metadata can identify promising difference networks and 
direct follow-on research based on DCN generated hypothesis.

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