Research Interests

 

My research attempts to expand the field of mathematical genomics on several fronts.  This includes the probabilistic modeling of prokaryotic genome evolution, with particular attention to short inversions, gene duplications, insertions and deletions, and investigating the consequences of these mechanisms for gene-order based phylogenetics.  The modeling of eukaryotic nuclear genome evolution poses somewhat different problems, particularly the quantitative parameters of inversion, transposition, translocation and duplication, and the connection between rearrangements observed at the experimental, clinical, population and evolutionary levels. The availability of refined genome sequences from humans and other mammals raise many new types of question for comparative study, largely due to uncertainty in gene localization and the identification of homologous genes in related species.  We have recently been focusing on the combination of statistical and algorithmic approaches to this problem.

 

These models give rise to statistical analyses and tests for a variety of questions pertaining to functional versus historical versus random proximities of genes.  Comparison of the models with empirical data also promise to contribute to understanding phenomena as diverse as speciation, infertility due to chromosomal rearrangement, and chromosomal aberrations in neoplasms.