Professor, Department of Medicine Section of Genetic Medicine and Department of Human Genetics
Senior Fellow, Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
Senior Fellow, Computation Institute at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
M.S. (Mathematical Biology) Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, Russia, 1985
Ph.D. (Genetics) Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Novosibirsk, Russia, 1990
Cummings Life Science Center 920 E. 58th St., Room 408 Chicago, IL 60637
Phone: (773) 834-7367
Fax: (773) 834-2877
 

Research Description

My main interest is in (asymptotic) understanding how phenotypes, such as human healthy diversity and maladies, are implemented at the level of genes and networks of interacting molecules. To harvest as much information about known molecular interactions as possible, my group runs a large-scale text-mining effort aiming at analysis of a vast corpus of biomedical publications. Currently we can extract from text automatically about 500 distinct flavors of relations among biomedical entities (such as bind, activate, merystilate, and transport). To sharpen our text-mining axes, we are actively designing related models and computational applications. Furthermore, in cooperation with our experimentally talented colleagues, we are striving to use text-mined networks to understand, interpret and refine high- or low-throughput experimental data.  We are also computationally generating biological hypotheses that our generous collaborators are attempting to test experimentally. My older (still smoldering) passion is in developing and applying computational methods related to phylogenetics and evolutionary biology. Research interests include: (1) Bioinformatics and phylogenetics applied to analysis of genes, proteins, molecular pathways, and human disease. (2) Application of statistics to sequence analysis and analysis of molecular networks. (3) Development of algorithms and programs for pathway/sequence analysis, pathway/sequence comparison and phylogeny reconstruction.

Selected Publications

  • Iossifov I, Zheng T, Baron M, Gilliam TC, Rzhetsky A. (2008) Genetic-linkage mapping of complex hereditary disorders to a whole-genome molecular-interaction network. Genome Res. June 3.
  • Feldman I, Rzhetsky A, Vitkup D. (2008) Network properties of genes harboring inherited disease mutations. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 105, 4323-4328.
  • Rodriguez-Esteban R, Rzhetsky A. (2008) Six senses in the literature. The bleak sensory landscape of biomedical texts. EMBO Rep. 9, 212-215.
  • Yao L & Rzhetsky A. (2008) Quantitative systems-level determinants of human genes targeted by successful drugs. Genome Res. 18:206-213.
  • Rzhetsky, A., Wajngurt, D., Park, N. & Zheng, T. (2007) Probing genetic overlap among complex human phenotypes. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U S A. 104, 11694-11699.
  • Cokol, M., Rodriguez-Esteban, R. & Rzhetsky, A. (2007) A recipe for high impact. Genome Biol, 8, 406.
  • Cokol, M., Iossifov, I., Rodriguez-Esteban, R. & Rzhetsky, A. (2007) How many scientific papers should be retracted? EMBO Rep, 8. 422-423.
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Secondary Faculty