uOttawa

CONTACT US

Department of Biology
University of Ottawa

30 Marie Curie Pvt. Ottawa ON, K1N 6N5
CANADA

stephane.aris-brosou at uottawa.ca

Updated: December 20, 2011

 

The Aris-Brosou lab

Our research group works in Computational Molecular Evolution. The themes we address range from very specific theoretical aspects to applications based on real data sets (hypothesis-driven) or complete databases (both data and hypothesis-driven). Recent and current research topics include (click links below for details):

In collaboration with Drs. Tom Moon and Steve Perry, we studied the evolution of the α1-adrenoceptor (AR) gene family, which contains different subtypes that have distinct phar- macology. We showed that AR genes evolved by duplication events just before the origin of the jawed vertebrates and that the different subtypes may affect tissue specificity, ligand specificity and possibly signal transduction processes and desensitization. This study was then extended to the entire AR gene family in a range of vertebrates, to demonstrate that the diversification of this gene family occurred during duplication events that happened within distinct time pe- riods that correspond to whole-genome duplication events. The application of sophisticated phylogenetic methods in this work therefore suggests that key neurotransmitter and hormone receptors found in chordates diversified as a consequence of whole-genome duplication events, that each of these major events could be accompanied of several receptor-specific duplications, and followed by differential gene loss and brief episodes of adaptive evolution.

adrenoceptors



Research facilities

A small computer cluster was purchased from Sun Microsystems in 2007 thanks to a CFI grant with one X2200, three X4100 and two X4600 servers clocked at 2.6 GHz with 96 GB of distributed memory (up to 32 GB on the X4600s); iMacs, PC xeon boxes and (for legacy) ultra sparc 80s are available as workstations.

cluster