Event

ISR Systems Seminar: Eugene Koonin, "Genome Evolution"

Friday, February 20, 2009
11:00 a.m.
1146 AV Williams Building
Regina King
301 405 6615
rking12@umd.edu

ISR Systems Seminar
Evolutionary Universals and the Nature of Genome Evolution

Eugene V. Koonin, PhD
Senior Investigator
National Center for Biotechnology Information
National Library of Medicine
National Institutes of Health

Host
Alexander Barg

Abstract
It is generally assumed that evolution of genes and genomes is determined, primarily, by specific functional demands and constraints that are affected by purifying and positive selection. Recent observations made possible by the progress of comparative genomics and systems biology suggest a departure from this view. Genome evolution is characterized by a number of distinct universals that come in the form of distributions of important quantities, such as gene sequence evolution rate, gene family size, or expression level, and correlations, such as between gene sequence evolution rate, propensity for loss, and expression level. Essentially the distributions of these quantities and the same structure of correlations are seen in widely different organisms, from bacteria to mammals. I will argue that these universals of evolution are likely to be generated by simple, stochastic processes such as steady state gain and loss of genes. I will further present theoretical considerations and empirical evidence suggesting that the universal link between gene expression and sequence evolution rate is determined, primarily, by selection for protein robustness to translation-induced misfolding, apparently, a major factor of evolution. Selection affecting specific functions is undoubtedly crucial for the evolution of organisms but, quantitatively, could be a relatively minor force that modulates the universals shaped by non-selective, stochastic processes.

Biography
Eugene Koonin graduated from Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia (then USSR) in 1978 and received his PhD in Molecular Biology from the same University in 1983. He has been working in the fields of Computational Biology and Evolutionary Genomics since 1984. Dr. Koonin moved to the US in 1991, first, as a Visiting Scientist, and then, since 1996, as a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD. Dr. Koonin’s group performs research in many areas of evolutionary genomics, with a special emphasis on whole-genome approaches to the study of major transitions in life’s evolution, such as the origin of eukaryotes, the evolution of eukaryotic gene structure, and the origin of different classes of viruses.

In 2005, Dr. Koonin founded the journal Biology Direct, with Drs. Landweber and Lipman, in an effort to explore a novel system of open peer review. View Dr. Koonin's web page

Audience: Clark School  Graduate  Undergraduate  Faculty  Staff  Post-Docs