Research summary
Computational genomics refers to the use of computational and statistical analysis to decipher biology from genome sequences and related data. Dr. Aïda Ouangroua, Canada Research Chair in Biological and Computational Complexity, is developing methods to identify functional regions in genomes and discover the evolutionary relationships between functional regions at multiple embedded levels.
She and her research team aim to develop models of multiple RNA families for fast identification of RNA genes. They are also inferring evolutionary relationships between coding genes at the transcripts level and correcting gene trees using gene neighborhood information. Ultimately, their results will help solve some of the key challenges facing modern computational genomics, particularly with regards to scaling up genome annotation to the rapid advances of genome sequencing and allowing more insightful reconstructions of the evolution of genome components.