Nowick Lab

We got our grant proposal on “Long Non-Coding RNAs in Primate Brain Evolution” awarded. It is funded within the framework of the SPP 1738 “Emerging Roles of Non-coding RNAs in Nervous System Development, Plasticity and Disease”.

Sabina finished her thesis on the “Role of random monoallelically expressed genes in the
development of Alzheimer’s disease”. Congratulations to an excellent thesis work!

Our school on Programming for Evolutionary Biology will take place again in Spring 2014! It’s the perfect opportunity to learn programming and the analysis of Next Generation Sequencing data in two and a half weeks. Check out our website. Applications will be accepted now until January 15th.

Stefano presented his work at the annual meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution in Chicago in July 2013. The title of his talk was “Evolution of a Co-expression Network Involved in Primate Brain Functions and Cognitive Abilities”.

Our Programming for Evolutionary Biology course sparked interest in the German news service. The radio station MDR-Info did an interview with me, which was broadcasted on April 3rd 2013. In the interview I describe the content and philosophy of the course and also talk a bit about how my research group uses bioinformatics to answer questions related to evolutionary biology.

The author of the interview “BiologenWorkshop in Leipzig” is Karsten Moebius, MDR-Info.

Chris Balakrishnan and me are organizing a symposium on  “Evolution of behavior: Comparative genomics and transcriptomics” for the SMBE meeting this year.

We invited three excellent speakers: David Clayton, Todd Preuss, and Suzy Renn

The Meeting will take place in Chicago from July 7th to 11th. Online registration will start on January 25th 2013.  You are welcome to submit an abstract to the topic of our symposium:

Behavior is a complex phenotype determined by many genes. Behavior is also a plastic phenotype that individuals adjust according to environmental or physiological conditions. A systems biology perspective is therefore appropriate and necessary to study the evolution of behavior. This includes especially the comparative study of multiple genes, their expression and interactions involved in controlling behavior. With genomic and transcriptomic data from relevant study species now readily available and/or attainable, it is timely to bring specialists working on different taxa together to discuss general and taxa specific trends in our understanding of the evolution of behavior. Topics to discuss in this symposium will range from how to bridge the gap from changes in molecular signatures to changes in phenotype, evolution of social behavior, and individual variation in behavior. This symposium will stimulate fresh discussions among ecologists, neuroscientists, molecular and computational biologists to enhance our understanding of the evolution of behavior.

Registration now open!

After the great success of our course last year, there will be a 2013 edition: http://evop.bioinf.uni-leipzig.de/

We have again excellent teachers and speakers for you to learn how to program and analyze large datasets to answer evolutionary biology research questions.

Visit our Facebook page for latest news and pictures from last year!

Stefano presented his work on the evolution of a transcription factor network in primate brains at the Trends in Biology and Evolution conference. This conference is an annual, international meeting organized by CIBIO in Portugal.

To be published in Trends in Genetics: Katja Nowick, Miguel Carneiro and Rui Faria (2012) A prominent role of  KRAB-ZNF  transcription factors  in  mammalian speciation?

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168952512001916

In this paper we suggest that members of the family of KRAB-ZNF transcription factors are strong candidates of factors driving speciation in mammals.

Our research group is among the first groups that got awarded a research project within the newly founded German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv). In this project we are going to investigate the role chromosomal rearrangements and accompanying sequence and expression changes on speciation. Our model system are two European lizard species that occupy a hybrid zone in Italy and Slowenia.

This is a joint project with Prof. Martin Schlegel, Prof. Peter Stadler, Dr. Klaus Henle, and Dr. Rui Faria.