Faculty

Jan Mrazek, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Bioinformatics
Ph.D. (1992) Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Biophysics, Brno, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic)

Address: Department of Microbiology
550 Biological Sciences
Athens, GA 30602-2605
Phone: (706) 542-1065
E-mail: mrazek@uga.edu
Computational Microbiology Laboratory

Research Interests:
Discovery and interpretation of patterns in genomic DNA sequences; microbial comparative genomics; functional genomics; bioinformatics; structure and evolution of microbial genomes; development of methods and computer programs for DNA and protein sequence analyses.

My research program aims to use bioinformatics and comparative genomics to study relationships between the genomic DNA sequence and the organism's physiological characteristics, and regulatory processes that govern the flow of genetic information. The ultimate long-term goal is to understand the information encoded in the DNA to the extent that we can accurately predict properties of an organism including its responses to external stimuli from its genomic sequence. A common approach currently used is to find all genes and open reading frames in a genome, to predict their function from protein sequence comparisons (e.g., BLAST search), and, with the predicted complement of all proteins of the organism at hand, to speculate about its metabolic, cellular, and morphological characteristics. Less attention is given to sequence features not directly associated with genes and proteins. I use statistical and computational approaches to detect and compare sequence patterns and irregularities in the genomic sequences that may be biologically significant. Analysis of the properties and distribution of such patterns often provides hints about their possible roles at the molecular and/or cellular level. I am particularly interested in those sequence features that may act by promoting conformational transitions in the DNA molecule.