Our Programming for Evolutionary Biology course sparked interest in the German news service. The radio station MDR-Info did an interview with me, which was broadcasted on April 3rd 2013. In the interview I describe the content and philosophy of the course and also talk a bit about how my research group uses bioinformatics to answer questions related to evolutionary biology.
The author of the interview “BiologenWorkshop in Leipzig” is Karsten Moebius, MDR-Info.
Chris Balakrishnan and me are organizing a symposium on “Evolution of behavior: Comparative genomics and transcriptomics” for the SMBE meeting this year.
We invited three excellent speakers: David Clayton, Todd Preuss, and Suzy Renn
The Meeting will take place in Chicago from July 7th to 11th. Online registration will start on January 25th 2013. You are welcome to submit an abstract to the topic of our symposium:
Behavior is a complex phenotype determined by many genes. Behavior is also a plastic phenotype that individuals adjust according to environmental or physiological conditions. A systems biology perspective is therefore appropriate and necessary to study the evolution of behavior. This includes especially the comparative study of multiple genes, their expression and interactions involved in controlling behavior. With genomic and transcriptomic data from relevant study species now readily available and/or attainable, it is timely to bring specialists working on different taxa together to discuss general and taxa specific trends in our understanding of the evolution of behavior. Topics to discuss in this symposium will range from how to bridge the gap from changes in molecular signatures to changes in phenotype, evolution of social behavior, and individual variation in behavior. This symposium will stimulate fresh discussions among ecologists, neuroscientists, molecular and computational biologists to enhance our understanding of the evolution of behavior.
Registration now open!
After the great success of our course last year, there will be a 2013 edition: http://evop.bioinf.uni-leipzig.de/
We have again excellent teachers and speakers for you to learn how to program and analyze large datasets to answer evolutionary biology research questions.
Visit our Facebook page for latest news and pictures from last year!
Stefano presented his work on the evolution of a transcription factor network in primate brains at the Trends in Biology and Evolution conference. This conference is an annual, international meeting organized by CIBIO in Portugal.
To be published in Trends in Genetics: Katja Nowick, Miguel Carneiro and Rui Faria (2012) A prominent role of KRAB-ZNF transcription factors in mammalian speciation?
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168952512001916
In this paper we suggest that members of the family of KRAB-ZNF transcription factors are strong candidates of factors driving speciation in mammals.
Our research group is among the first groups that got awarded a research project within the newly founded German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv). In this project we are going to investigate the role chromosomal rearrangements and accompanying sequence and expression changes on speciation. Our model system are two European lizard species that occupy a hybrid zone in Italy and Slowenia.
This is a joint project with Prof. Martin Schlegel, Prof. Peter Stadler, Dr. Klaus Henle, and Dr. Rui Faria.
We are organizing an international programming school for Biologists (or related scientists). The focus will be on teaching how to solve questions related to evolution in a computational way. The school will take place at the University Leipzig from March 17th to April 1st 2012. For more information about the course and how to apply see: http://evop.bioinf.uni-leipzig.de.
Together with Rui Faria’s group from CIBIO (Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal) we got awarded our grant to study chromosomal speciation. We will investigate the “Genomic distribution of sequence and gene expression differences between mammalian species: the importance of chromosomal
rearrangements in speciation”. The project will be funded by the initiatives of the German DAAD and the Portuguese FCT and CRUP on person exchange: “Acções Integradas Luso-Alemãs”.
Rosalina, Stefano, and Lia presented their latest research results at the annual Fall seminar in Bioinformatics in Vysoka Lipa (Decin), in the Czech Republic. We also enjoyed the company of all of our colleagues while playing games, hiking, and drinking …
Thanks to Marcus Lechner for the pictures!
In this paper we describe the genome of a German individual for which we independently sequenced both haplotype sequences of each chromosome. We revealed that most genes and their regulatory regions have different sequences on the two chromosomes. This means that for some proteins, a cell can produce two different versions with different functionalities and sometimes in different quantities. Zinc finger proteins are enriched among these proteins, which increases the number of different transcription factors that are active in a cell and might allow for a more complex or fine-tuned gene regulation.
The work was led by Dr. Margret Hoehe at the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. You can access the genome via the UCSC genome browser: http://www.molgen.mpg.de/~genetic-variation/MaxPlanckOneUCSC. Here is a link to the paper: http://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2011/08/02/gr.125047.111.abstract
