The Aris-Brosou lab
Our research group works in Computational Molecular Evolution. The themes we address range from very specific theoretical aspects to applications based on real data sets (hypothesis-driven) or complete databases (both data and hypothesis-driven). Recent and current research topics include (click links below for details):
- Influenza evolution
- Viral phylodynamics
- Theoretical developments in estimation of divergence times
- Environmental genomics of the Haptophytes
- Estimation of selective pressures acting on protein-coding genes
- Mode and tempo of the diversification of gene families
In collaboration with Drs. Hui Liu (Rutgers) and Colomban de Vargas (Rutgers, Roscoff), we produced and analyzed a large multiple sequence alignment of DNA sequences to reconstruct and date the phylogeny of the Haptophytes, a group of ecologically and biogeochemically significant marine protists. We employed sophisticated methods to eliminate artifacts such as long branch attraction.
Research facilities
A small computer cluster was purchased from Sun Microsystems in 2007 thanks to a CFI grant with one X2200, three X4100 and two X4600 servers clocked at 2.6 GHz with 96 GB of distributed memory (up to 32 GB on the X4600s); iMacs, PC xeon boxes and (for legacy) ultra sparc 80s are available as workstations.
