Stein-O'Brien Lab

Gene expression and protein levels are often uncorrelated. The direction of effect between epigenetics and expression is still unclear. By integrating multiomic time course data, we can begin to parse out these critical regulatory relationships and better understand the molecular mechanism at play. The machine-learning subdomain of transfer learning exploits the fact that if two datasets share common latent spaces, a feature mapping between the two can identify and characterize relationships between the data defined by individual latent spaces. In this framework, one dataset is the source in which the latent space representation is learned, and another is the target that is mapped into the latent spaces learned in the source. The distribution, domain, or feature space of the source and target data may differ. Thus, transfer-learning techniques are ideally suited to assess shared latent spaces across different high thoughput molecular assays. Once the robustness of a biological process is established across systems, these approaches can also be applied to use these learned latent spaces to enable exploration of process use across data platforms, modalities, and studies. These latent spaces can also be used to parameterize mathematical models for a more mechanistic representation of the biology.