Abstract: The Human Genome Project determined the genome sequence by the now classical overlap-layout-consensus. The raw data was reads of a few hundred basepairs at random locations in the genome.After the genome sequence was made public, new technology was developed that radically speeded up sequencing by orders of magnitude although the random reads were much shorter in length. This talk will describe these developments and the application of Euler's graphs which has replaced the former computational techniques.

Biography:Michael Waterman holds an Endowed Associates Chair at USC. Michael Waterman was named a Guggenheim Fellow (1995), elected to the American Academy of Art and Sciences (1995), elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2001) and to the National Academy of Engineering (2012). Also he is a Fellow of the following scientific organizations: American Association for the Advancement of Science(2001), Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics and International Society of Computational Biology(2009). In fall 2000 he became the first Fellow of Celera Genomics. In 2002 he received a Gairdner Foundation International Award and in 2005 he was elected to the French Académie des Sciences.

Professor Waterman works in the area of Computational Biology, concentrating on the creation and application of mathematics, statistics and computer science to molecular biology, particularly to DNA, RNA and protein sequence data. He is the co-developer of the Smith-Waterman algorithm for sequence comparison and of the Lander-Waterman formula for physical mapping.