Topic outline

  • General

    Next Generation Comparative Phylogenomics

    Geneva, 2-6 June 2014

    Overview

    The species classification is based on synapomorphies observed in comparative life science studies, including morphology, anatomy, cell biology, developmental biology. In this course, evolutionary concepts and biological findings will be linked to associated alterations at the molecular level.

    This event will be composed of

    • a 4-day course (limited to 20 registered participants, priority to PhD students members of StarOmics doctoral program)
    • a mini symposium, open to all (4th of June)

    Objectives

    The purpose of this course is to explore efficient ways of moving from molecular phylogenetics to comparative phylogenomics. Theoretical sessions will introduce concepts of genome evolution, phylogenomic data resources and methods suitable to large-scale analysis. The practicals will cover a wide range of tasks essential to next generation comparative phylogenomics. Course days will be an alternance of lectures and practicals. At the mini-symposium, international experts will present studies on improving the quality of large-scale analysis and application of comparative phylogenomics.

    Requirements

    • Skills: Basics in evolutionary biology, phylogenetics and bioinformatics (recommended, but not mandatory).
    • Please bring your own laptop with WIFI activated

    Application

    Application is now closed.

    Location

    Centre Médical Universitaire (CMU), Geneva

    Course: Room S3
    Mini symposium: auditorium C150

    Additional information

    We will recommend 1 ECTS credit for the course and an additional ECTS credit for an optional project (participants will be contacted before the course starts).

  • Schedule

    Monday, June 2: Evolution of life, genomes, proteomes, proteins
    Group Xenarios. Brigitte Boeckmann, Emmanuel Boutet
    Theoretical: Evolution of life; Model organisms; Reference proteomes; Protein evolution; Protein architectures.
    Practical: Prediction of remote protein family members (Similarity vs homology); Comparison of domain architectures; Domain orthology; Concepts of phylogenomic databases.

    Tuesday, June 3: Comparative genomics
    Group Zdobnov. Evgenia Kriventseva, Thomas Petty, Thomas Junier
    Theoretical: Comparative genomics, Orthology, Handling Phylogenetic trees (introduction of Newick utilities), Metagenomics.

    Practicals: OrthoDB, Newick utilities, Metagenomics tools.

    Wednesday, June 4: mini-SYMPOSIUM (schedule)

    Thursday, June 5: Comparative phylogenomics
    Group Milinkovitch. Djordje Grbic, Michel Milinkovitch, Athanasia Tzika, Asier Ullate
    Theoretical: Multi-species genome comparisons, phylogeny inference

    Practicals: MANTiS, MetaPIGA, FigTree.

    Friday, June 6: Gene and genome duplication
    Group Robinson-Rechavi. Nadezda Kryuchkova, Sacha Laurent, Marc Robinson-Rechavi
    Duplication is responsible for a large part of the diversity of genes present in genomes. We will study how gene or genome duplications are detected and characterized bioinformatically; discuss examples of whole genome duplication; study the models of evolution for duplicate genes; examine methods and types of data to test these models; and finally discuss recent results from my lab concerning the evolution of orthologs and paralogs.
    The day will be an alternance of lectures and practical use of web-based bioinformatics resources.

    projects: contact Marc Robinson-Rechavi

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    Mini-SYMPOSIUM

    4-June-2014, UNIGE-CMU, Auditorium C150

    Program (pdf)

    9:30-9:40
    Ioannis Xenarios

    Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), Switzerland
    Welcome

    Session I: Methods for Phylogenomics

    Chair: Evgeny Zdobnov

    9:40-10:25
    Des Higgins
    Conway Institute, University College Dublin, Ireland
    "Making accurate multiple sequence alignments of very large numbers of protein sequences"

    10:25-11:10
    Eyal Privmann
    Institute of Evolution, University of Haifa, Israel
    "Alignment reliability, alignment filtering, and their effect on downstream evolutionary analyses"

    11:10-11:40 Coffee break

    11:40-12:25
    Maria Anisimova
    Institute of Applied Simulations, Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), and Computer Science Department, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland
    "Current standards in phylogenomics as applied to sequences with tandem repeats”"

    12:25-13:45 Lunch break

    Session II: Applied Phylogenomics

    Chair: Michel Milinkovitch

    13:45-14:30
    Vincent Daubin
    Biometry and Evolutionary Biology laboratory (LBBE), National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Lyon 1, France
    "Genomes as documents of evolutionary history"

    14:30-15:15
    Shinichi Sunagawa
    European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany
    "Quantitative metagenomics of the human gut and ocean microbiome"

    15:15-15:45 Coffee break

    15:45-16:30
    Margarida Cardoso Moreira
    Center for Integrative Genomics, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
    "Functional evolution of mammalian genomes”"

    16:30-17:00
    Panel discussion
    Moderator: Marc Robinson-Rechavi
    "Thousands of phylogenies with thousands of species, then what?"

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