Laboratory of Evolutionary Genetics at NIG

Current interests in the lab include:

• Identifying global forces governing protein evolution. Our findings suggest that selection acts on the amino acid usage of microbial proteomes to optimize the efficiency of the synthesis of proteins as well as their particular functions and we are expanding these analyses to multicellular eukaryotes.
• Studying lineage-specific patterns of silent and protein evolution among closely related species. We have developed a robust approach to ancestral state reconstruction for polymorphism/divergence analysis among closely related species. We apply this approach to genome-wide analysis of adaptation and non-equilibrium evolution.
• Developing and testing models of the evolutionary process under a balance among weak forces that fluctuate over time. We employ computer simulations to model weak selection in the context of genetic linkage and fitness interactions among mutations to determine the appropriate data and statistical methods to detect subtle forces in evolution.

Brief project descriptions:

• Metabolic economics and bacterial proteome evolution
• Translational selection and yeast proteome evolution
• Weak selection and codon bias evolution in Drosophila
• Ancestral inference for population genetic analysis
• Phenotypic basis of selection at silent sites
• Mechanisms of protein evolution
• Selection at silent sites in the human genome
• Molecular phylogeny of the Drosophila melanogaster species subgroup
• Vectorette PCR method