Events in MathSys and Complexity Science
This is a calendar page detailing events within the MathSys CDT. It also acts as a booking diary for the Seminar Room D1.07. To book D1.07 please email Sheetal.Sharma@warwick.ac.uk
Please note that your event booking is for D1.07 only. The adjacent common room is a private area for the MathSys Centre that cannot used as part of your booking.
MathSys CDT events have priority for D1.07 room bookings.
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Complexity Forum: Iain Johnston (Imperial College London)
Speaker: Iain Johnston (Imperial College London)
Title: Evolution of mitochondrial genomes across the Tree of Life
Abstract: Mitochondria are ATP-producing organelles present within most eukaryotic cells, originating from an endosymbiotic event billions of years ago, when a 'proto-mitochondrion' with its own genome was incorporated into an ancestral host cell. Mitochondrial genomes have since lost most of their genes, which have either been transferred to the host nuclear genome or lost completely. The features governing this gene loss remain debated: a number of hypotheses have been proposed, but have never been quantitatively explored. I'll talk about our powerful new approach coupling stochastic modelling with Bayesian inference to infer the ordering and causes of evolutionary events, and its application to whole organellar genome data from across the entire eukaryotic tree of life. Our approach, which we term HyperTraPS (hypercubic transition path sampling), elucidates the probabilistic ordering of mitochondrial gene loss and allows us to compare hypotheses regarding causative factors. Our results support the hypotheses that protein import influences gene presence within the mitochondrion, and that the ability to locally control bioenergetic machinery plays a role in mitochondrial evolution, while highlighting previously unidentified factors governing mitochondrial gene retention.