témavezető: Szöllősi Gergely
helyszín (magyar oldal): Evolutionary Genomics Research Group, Dept. of Biological Physics, Institute of Physics, Eötvös University helyszín rövidítés: ELTE
A kutatási téma leírása:
A 4-year PhD position is available to join the Evolutionary Genomics Research Group with full funding from the ERC “GENECLOCKS” project. The research group is lead by Dr. Gergely Szollosi ( http://bit.ly/2c1JqfR ) and actively collaborates with the research groups of Vincent Daubin, Nicolas Lartillot and Bastien Boussau (Evolutionary Genomics and Phylogeny, CNRS, Lyon France) as well as Eric Tannier (Bioinformatics, Computer Science, INRIA Lyon France), Tom Williams (Molecular evolution, phylogenetics , University of Bristol), Carolin Kosiol (Bioinformatics, Vetmeduni Vienna) and Jens Lagergren (KTH, Stockholm). The successful candidate will have the opportunity to work with and visit for periods of up to several months the collaborating parties.
Research Topic: With the advent of genome-scale sequencing, molecular phylogeny, which reconstructs gene trees from homologous sequences, has reached an impasse. Instead of answering open questions, new genomes have reignited old debates. The problem is clear, gene trees are not species trees, each is the unique result of series of evolutionary events. If, however, we model these differences in the context of a common species tree, we can access a wealth of information on genome evolution and the diversification of species that is not available to traditional methods. For example, as horizontal gene transfer (HGT) can only occur between coexisting species, HGTs provide information on the order of speciations. When HGT is rare, lineage sorting can generate incongruence between gene trees and the dating problem can be formulated in terms of biologically meaningful parameters (such as population size), that are informative on the rate of evolution and hence invaluable to molecular dating.
The first goal of ERC “GENECLOCKS” research group is to develop methods that systematically extract information on the pattern and timing of genomic evolution by explaining differences between gene trees. This will allow us to, for the first time, reconstruct a dated tree of life from genome-scale data. We will use parallel programming to maximise the number of genomes analysed. Our second goal is to apply these methods to open problems, e.g.: i) to resolve the timing of microbial evolution and its relationship to Earth history, where the extreme paucity of fossils limits the use of molecular dating methods, by using HGT events as “molecular fossils”; ii) to reconstruct rooted phylogenies from complete genomes and harness phylogenetic incongruence to answer long standing questions, such as the of diversification of animals or the position of eukaryotes among archaea; and iii) for eukaryotic groups such as Fungi, where evidence of significant amounts of HGT is emerging our methods will also allow the quantification of the extent of HGT.
place of research in brief: The recently established Evolutionary Genomics Research Group is funded under a highly competitive 5 year grant from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' "Momentum" program as well as an ERC Starting Grant starting in 2017. The Institute of Physics has been included in the Excellence Group of European Universities, and has achieved top placement in the number of citations, the number of ERC grants, the time available for PhD research and the gender balance of masters students in the CHE Excellence Ranking. The research group is associated to the Depts. of Biological Physics and Complex Systems composed of several interdisciplinary research groups including those of Prof. Imre Derenyi, Prof. Tamas Vicsek, and Prof. Istvan Csabai.
előírt nyelvtudás: excellent english felvehető hallgatók száma: 1
Jelentkezési határidő: 2018-05-31
2024. IV. 17. ODT ülés Az ODT következő ülésére 2024. június 14-én, pénteken 10.00 órakor kerül sor a Semmelweis Egyetem Szenátusi termében (Bp. Üllői út 26. I. emelet).
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