INSIGHTS INTO HUMAN EVOLUTIONARY GENOMICS: STRATIFICATION, SELECTION AND STRUCTURAL VARIATION

WELCOME SEMINAR IN BIODIVERSITY AND EVOLUTION

In this talk I will present my previous research in human population genetics and evolutionary genomics. I have worked in different projects dealing with different aspects of human genome variation and diversity. The talk will be divided into three sections:
- Human diversity in the Andean Altiplano. For my PhD I analysed the genetic diversity of the two main native groups in Bolivia (Aymaras and Quechuas) contributing to a deeper knowledge about the human diversity in South America.
- Adaptive evolution in the human lineage. In this study I combined several methods to detect adaptive evolution in human coding sequences at a genome-wide level, acquiring experience in bioinformatics. We used variation data in the current human population and sequence divergence information.
- Human polymorphic inversions. In this section I will present the nucleotide variation analysis I performed around polymorphic inversions. We observed different patterns that suggested a high degree of inversion recurrence during human evolution.

Magdalena completed a PhD in human population genetics in 2011 at Universitat de Barcelona and Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse. She studied the genetic relationships between the two main native groups in Bolivia. After her PhD, she did an MSc in Bioinformatics and carried out the research project in an Evolutionary Genomics group at IMIM (PRBB, Barcelona) searching for signatures of positive selection in the human lineage. The last two years she did a post-doc at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) on a project focused on human polymorphic inversions. She has recently joined the HUMEVOL group at CIBIO-InBIO to work in a project about human diversity of southern Angola.

[Group Leader: Jorge Rocha Human Evolutionary Genetics]

Image credits: Magdalena Gayà