Section: Research Program

Comparative genomics

The central dogma of evolutionary biology postulates that contemporary genomes evolved from a common ancestral genome, but the large scale study of their evolutionary relationships is frustrated by the unavailability of these ancestral organisms that have long disappeared. However, this common inheritance allows us to discover these relationships through comparison, to identify those traits that are common and those that are novel inventions since the divergence of different lineages.

We develop efficient methodologies and software for associating biological information with complete genome sequences, in the particular case where several phylogenetically-related eukaryote genomes are studied simultaneously.

The methods designed by Magnome for comparative genome annotation, structured genome comparison, and construction of integrated models are applied on a large scale to: eukaryotes from the hemiascomycete class of yeasts [32] , [33] , [5] , [9] , [2] , [10] and to lactic bacteria used in winemaking [31] , [26]