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Talk Title :
Vertebrate Comparative and Regulatory Genomics
Date / Time / Location:
Thursday February 12th, 2009 – 6:00 pm
Atrium, Bellini Building
McGill Life Sciences Complex
Affiliation :
MCB, McGill Center for Bioinformatics
Abstract :
This talk will bring together my two passions, genome evolution and gene regulation, and will discuss what the former can teach us about the latter. We have recently shown that the genome of an ancestral mammal living about 70 Million years ago can be computationally reconstructed to a surprising degree of accuracy from the genomes of extant species. In the first part of this talk, I will introduce some of the computational challenges related to the accurate reconstruction of an ancestral genome. I will then describe how this new genome, strategically positioned at the center of the mammalian radiation, allows a detailed study of the evolution of transcriptional regulatory regions. Finally, I will describe how whole-genome analyses based in part on comparative genomics reveal new and unexpected traits of mammalian regulatory regions, both those located in non-coding regions and those hiding within protein-coding DNA.