Navigating landscapes of admixture (VRG20-001) 2021-2029
The goal of this project is to develop methods for detecting introgression between differentiated populations. The complex history of admixture has left traces in the genomes of humans and other species, in the form of short introgressed fragments. Comparing the landscapes of these fragments across populations may reveal important features of evolutionary histories, such as natural selection after admixture, or functional consequences of the introduction of genetic material.
Some major challenges are differences in the amount of sequencing data and the fact that methods are often tailored to the human-Neandertal case. We want to analyse large-scale datasets of variation and assess and develop methods to detect gene flow and its genomic distribution in different species in the same manner.