17/11/2015

Thesis defence of José Luis Villanueva-Cañas: "Insights into mammalian adaptive evolution through genomics data"

On 20th of November at 15:00, José Luis Villanueva-Cañas, member of the Evolutionary Genomics group of GRIB (IMIM-UPF) will defend his thesis  "Insights into mammalian adaptive evolution through genomics data" at Sala Ramón y Cajal (PRBB ground floor). You are all invited to this event.

Abstract:

Although the genome sequencing revolution is still in its infancy, we must acknowledge it as the major driver of biology since the beginning of the 21st century. The availability of a large collection of complete mammalian genomes due to high-throughput sequencing technologies allows us to begin the exploration of how the evolutionary diversification of gene content reflects the ecological adaptations of different taxa. Novelty arises in evolution through the transformation or combination of existing systems and, as shown recently, also from scratch. This thesis is centered around these different mechanisms of evolutionary innovation. It includes a common methodological part in which we propose a simple method to optimize multiple alignments and examine its effect in positive selection analyses, the exploration of the origin and evolution of mammalian-specific genes, and the study of gene regulation in mammalian adaptations (e.g. hibernation) using high-throughput technologies.