The Department of Genetics is advertising for a Professor of Genetics, with a strong possibility that this could be someone in the field of Evolutionary or Population Genetics. Get in touch if you are interested.

Thanks Fergal for organising the symposium yesterday, and thanks to all our speakers. It was a great success.

Jan 13th, 2012

Department of Genetics, Downing Site, Biffen lecture theatre/Part II room

The programme for this years event is available here: 4th Cambridge Evolutionary Genetics Workshop_Jan13_2012_ Program

10:15 Welcome and introduction
Session 1 Chair: Chris Jiggins
10:20 Steve Russell, Department of Genetics
A meiotic drive system based on homing endonucleases (HEGs) with the aim of controlling themosquito populations that transmit malaria

10:40 Gianni Lo Iacono, Department of Veterinary Medicine/ Rothamsted Research
Epidemiological modelling; Evolution of plant pathogens in response to qualitative and
quantitative resistance

11:00 Eric Miska, Department of Biochemistry
Evolutionary viral sensitivity in small RNA in Caenorhabditae

11:20 Rachel Walker, Department of Plant Sciences
Determining the regulators of petal spot development and the evolution of this specialised floral trait within the species complex Gorteria diffusa

11:40 Clare Baker, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience
A “sixth sense”; the development and evolution of vertebrate electroreceptors

12:00 – 13:00 Lunch

Session 2 Chair: Frank Jiggins
13:00 Invited speaker: Judith Mank, University of Oxford/ University College London
Sex chromosomes, sex-specific selection and the genomic basis of sexual dimorphism

13:45 Chris Illingworth, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Quantifying selection acting on a complex trait using allele frequency time-series data

14:05 Simon Martin, Department of Zoology
Species integrity of sympatric Heliconius butterflies is maintained despite pervasive introgression throughout the genome.

14:25 Simon Frost, Department of Veterinary Medicine
Modeling associations between mutations with graphical models

14:45 Paulo Amaral, The Gurdon Institute
The emerging roles of long noncoding RNAs in animal development and regulatory evolution

15:05 – 15:40 Tea
Session 3 Chair: Fergal Waldron
15: 40 Lucy Weinert, UCL Genetics Institute, University College London
The evolution of host shifts in Staphylococcus aureus

16:00 Peter Ellis, Department of Pathology
Gene amplification as a side-effect of genomic conflict

16:20 Michaela de Clare, Department of Biochemistry
Evolution & conservation of growth control genes from yeast to humans

16:40 Jason Tsai, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Findings from the tapeworm genome project

17:00 Hashem Koohy, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Composure: an evolutionary approach for detection of regulatory sequences

Followed by Happy Hour in the tea room at 17:20

The updated program for the 3rd CEG-workshop can be found here: CEG-program_full

John Welch has just joined the Genetics department in Cambridge as a lecturer. John works on molecular evolution, in particular studying DNA sequence for signatures of selection. Welcome to Cambridge!

Simon Baxter has just taken over organising the Evolutionary Genetics Journal Club, which is held at 1pm every two weeks in the Zoology department. Many thanks to Lena Wilfert for organising it up until now.

We are holding a regular reading group to look at Mike Lynch’s book ‘The Origins of Genome Architecture’. This is held in the Zoology department at 2pm on Wednesday afternoons. Please contact Jamie Walters (jw663) for further information.

Jamie Walters has just established an email ListServ for Cambridge Evolutionary Genetics. If you would like to subscribe, and find out about what is going on, please follow this link