Department of Biology

Renn Lab

Student Project Ideas

(check back often as new ideas will be added)

These pages include scientific ideas that supplement my own research interests. I provide a short summary and a few references but students are encouraged to propose independent ideas.

  1. Genetic Basis for Maternal Behavior in A. burtoni * (several projects)
  2. Natural vs. Environmental Sex-Role Reversal among Julidochromis species * (several projects)
  3. Identification of Rapidly Evolving Cichlid Genes with hCGH *
  4. Proof of Principle for hCGH using Drosophila melanogaster (related to project 3)
  5. Sex Determination in African Cichlids
  6. Data Imputation with cDNA Microarray Data
  7. Assortitive Mating by Cichlid Populations
  8. Blue fish / Yellow fish
  9. Bioinformatics (several projects available)
  10. Genomic Resources for Cichlids - complete 2006 Robby Kunkle

(* indicates ongoing projects that are a main focus in our research)

 

Student Project Idea 6

Data Imputation with cDNA Microarray Data

Microarry techniques allow us to monitor the expression level for thousands of genes at once. The data from these experiments often includes a substantial amount of missing data due to technical error. The missing data creates issues for various statistical analyses, therefore some researchers implement various strategies of "data imputation" in order to fill in the missing data. Most of the comparative evaluation of these strategies has been done with very large data sets from cancer research or model organisms. In my lab our data sets are of a more modest size due to the limitations on samle collection. What is the affect of data imputation, and what is the most effective strategy for these data sets?

 

This project, or others involving the devopment of statistical analyses for microarray data would be conducted in collaboration with Albyn Jones of the Math Department.

References