Congrats to...
August 2024: Student fellowship
Major congratulations to PhD student Ioanna Kotari (Borges group), who earned a prestigious 2-year DOC fellowship from the ÖAW (Austrian Academy of Sciences) with her project "PoMo-cod: Integrating Demography and Selection in Codon evolution."
During this fellowship she will aim to advance evolutionary biology through the development of "PoMo-cod" (Polymorphism-aware phylogenetic Model for CODon evolution). Traditional models often overlook genetic variation within species and other key factors such as demographic changes and selection on synonymous sites. PoMo-cod addresses these gaps by incorporating polymorphisms, population size variations, and GC-bias gene conversion, providing a more comprehensive understanding of evolutionary processes.
Key goals of PoMo-cod include:
- Explicitly modelling positive diversifying selection, which drives adaptation through recurrent amino acid changes.
- Integrating varying demography, GC-bias gene conversion and selection pressures, including those on synonymous sites, for more accurate evolutionary inferences.
- Detecting patterns of diversifying selection in fruit fly and great ape datasets, leveraging their diverse genomic attributes.
By utilising Bayesian and Maximum likelihood frameworks, along with exploring AI and Machine Learning to alleviate some computational burden, PoMo-cod aims to improve computational efficiency and accessibility, enabling more precise analysis of multi-individual and multi-species data. This will benefit the broader scientific community and advance the field of evolutionary research.
