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
- 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
The goal of this research is to find predictors of the emergence of novel infuenza viruses. For this, we are exploring a number of directions and testing specific hypotheses, such as:
- the natural history of recent pandemics
- the timing of viral adjustement to a new host
- measures of genome-wide reassortment
- the link between reassortment and prevalence
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.
