Speaker: Ben Jacobs, Graduate Student, Department of Statistics, Iowa State University

Title: Detection of Mid-Parent Heterosis

Abstract: Mid-Parent Heterosis (MPH) is when the expected gene expression of a hybrid organism is not equal to the average of the two parents' expected gene expressions. This talk will be an overview of the recent work I've been doing to use Poisson-based models to detect MPH and estimate the false discovery rate. The fully Bayesian models I'd tried were found to be unreliable in estimation of false discovery rate, so an empirical Bayesian method is proposed which appears to provide better estimates.