GEE SEMINAR. Dr Jeff Streicher, NHM

The speaker for the talk on the 26th of Nov will be Dr Jeff Streicher, NHM.

Host: Julia Day

Abstract
Chromosomal architecture has played a key role in the evolution of biodiversity. Detecting structural variants (SVs) on chromosomes has informed the study of speciation, sex determination, adaptation, and some of the earliest divergences in the tree of life. I will describe a computationally non-intensive approach, based on geometric morphometrics, that uses conserved DNA sequences as landmarks to quantify structural disparities of focal chromosomes across multiple species, individuals, or cell types. This ‘geno-metric’ method can be applied at micro- and macroevolutionary scales to discover and diagnose SVs. Using single copy orthologous loci as landmarks, I will discuss several empirical datasets along with simulation results related to the accumulation of structural disparity. Landmark-based structural disparity analysis effectively identifies chromosomal rearrangements and has parallels with traditional morphometrics regarding chromosome size, landmark orientation and landmark availability. Disparity patterns of SVs can also have significant phylogenetic signal, giving them broad importance for studying evolutionary biology. Structural disparity analyses have potential to be a valuable addition to the comparative genomic toolkit in that they offer (1) an intuitive, rapid mechanism for detecting SVs associated with single copy genetic landmarks and (2) the opportunity to study genomic structural evolution using interdisciplinary concepts like integration and regionalisation.