Introduced by: Keith Dunker, Honorary Conference Chair; Professor Emeritus, Indiana University School of Medicine, United States
Time: Tuesday July 12, 2022 at 8:45 AM - 9:45 AM CDT
Room: Madison Ballroom ABCD (Level Four, Monona Terrace)

Presentation Title: Gene evolution at transcript level: challenges and existing solutions

Abstract

Alternative splicing is a ubiquitous process in eukaryotes which allows a single gene to be transcribed into several different transcripts. Transcript evolution focuses on the evolution of gene products at transcript level. The study of the evolution of homologous gene transcripts provides additional information on gene evolution such as the identification of conserved isoforms, the history of isoforms gains and losses along gene phylogenies, and the evolution of alternative splicing.  In this talk, I provide a unified view of various models of transcript evolution constrained by gene phylogenies with underlying transcript phylogeny reconstruction problems. I describe existing solutions, including a set of methods and a database we have developed to study transcript evolution.

Biography

Aïda earned her  Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2007 from University of Bordeaux (FR) where she also received her Master’s degree in Computer Science, and a Master's degree in Computer Engineering from ENSEIRB-MATMECA in 2004. After a postdoc at Simon Fraser University and Université du Québec à Montréal (CA), she joined INRIA Lille (FR) as researcher in 2009, and then Université de Sherbrooke (CA) in 2014. She is currently full professor at Université de Sherbrooke where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Computational and Biological Complexity. Her research group focuses on the development of models and algorithms in comparative genomics to understand the intertwined evolution of genomes, genes and RNA transcripts.  Aïda is also actively engaged in community service, including currently as associate editor for Bioinformatics Advances,  Journal of Computational Biology, and Molecular Biology and Evolution. She also regularly serves as PC member, and she has served as Organization, PC and Area Chairs in top conferences of her  field — RECOMB-CG, GLBIO, and ISMB.