Aoife McLysaght | |
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| Alma mater | Trinity College Dublin (BA, PhD) |
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| Scientific career | |
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| Institutions | Trinity College Dublin University of California, Irvine |
| Thesis | Evolution of vertebrate genome organisation (2002) |
| Doctoral advisor | Kenneth H. Wolfe [2] |
| Website | www |
Aoife McLysaght is an Irish geneticist and a professor in the Molecular Evolution Laboratory of the Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. [1] [3] [4] [5]
McLysaght was educated at the Trinity College Dublin where she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Genetics in 1998, followed by a PhD in 2002 for research supervised by Kenneth H. Wolfe on the evolution of vertebrate genome organisation. [2] [6] [7] [8]
Following her PhD, she completed postdoctoral research at the University of California, Irvine [9] working with Brandon Gaut before returning to work in Dublin in 2003. Her research in molecular evolution and comparative genomics [1] has been published in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals including Nature , [10] Nature Genetics , [11] Bioinformatics , [12] Genome Research , [13] PNAS [14] [15] and the journal Yeast . [16]
She has served as senior editor and associate editor for the journals Molecular Biology and Evolution and Genome Biology and Evolution , and is on the editorial board of the journal Cell Reports . She is a member of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) and The Genetics Society.[ citation needed ] She served as Treasurer of SMBE 2012–14 and was elected President of the Society in 2017. [17]
McLysaght is a regular contributor to public events, and has spoken at IGNITE Electric Picnic, [18] [19] TEDx, The Royal Institution, and on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Infinite Monkey Cage . [20] She brought genetics to a wider audience in the Royal Institution 2013 advent calendar [9] where she featured in videos on human chromosome 1, [21] human chromosome 14, [22] mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) [23] and the Science Gallery, Dublin. In 2018 she joined with Alice Roberts to write and present the televised Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. [24]
McLysaght was awarded European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant 2018–23 and an ERC Starting Researcher grant from 2013 to 2018, and the President of Ireland Young Researcher's Award by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) in 2005. [25] [26] She gave the J. B. S. Haldane lecture of The Genetics Society in 2016. [27] She was one of eight women scientists whose portrait was commissioned as part of the Royal Irish Academy's Women on Walls project. [28]
In 2010 she was elected a fellow of Trinity College Dublin. [29]
McLysaght is a granddaughter of genealogist Edward MacLysaght. [30] McLysaght has two children, and a dog whose genome has been sequenced. [31]
In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA. The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding genes, other functional regions of the genome such as regulatory sequences, and often a substantial fraction of junk DNA with no evident function. Almost all eukaryotes have mitochondria and a small mitochondrial genome. Algae and plants also contain chloroplasts with a chloroplast genome.
A transposable element is a nucleic acid sequence in DNA that can change its position within a genome, sometimes creating or reversing mutations and altering the cell's genetic identity and genome size. Transposition often results in duplication of the same genetic material. In the human genome, L1 and Alu elements are two examples. Barbara McClintock's discovery of them earned her a Nobel Prize in 1983. Its importance in personalized medicine is becoming increasingly relevant, as well as gaining more attention in data analytics given the difficulty of analysis in very high dimensional spaces.
The human genome is a complete set of nucleic acid sequences for humans, encoded as DNA within the 23 chromosome pairs in cell nuclei and in a small DNA molecule found within individual mitochondria. These are usually treated separately as the nuclear genome and the mitochondrial genome. Human genomes include both protein-coding DNA sequences and various types of DNA that does not encode proteins. The latter is a diverse category that includes DNA coding for non-translated RNA, such as that for ribosomal RNA, transfer RNA, ribozymes, small nuclear RNAs, and several types of regulatory RNAs. It also includes promoters and their associated gene-regulatory elements, DNA playing structural and replicatory roles, such as scaffolding regions, telomeres, centromeres, and origins of replication, plus large numbers of transposable elements, inserted viral DNA, non-functional pseudogenes and simple, highly repetitive sequences. Introns make up a large percentage of non-coding DNA. Some of this non-coding DNA is non-functional junk DNA, such as pseudogenes, but there is no firm consensus on the total amount of junk DNA.
Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, three-dimensional structural configuration. In contrast to genetics, which refers to the study of individual genes and their roles in inheritance, genomics aims at the collective characterization and quantification of all of an organism's genes, their interrelations and influence on the organism. Genes may direct the production of proteins with the assistance of enzymes and messenger molecules. In turn, proteins make up body structures such as organs and tissues as well as control chemical reactions and carry signals between cells. Genomics also involves the sequencing and analysis of genomes through uses of high throughput DNA sequencing and bioinformatics to assemble and analyze the function and structure of entire genomes. Advances in genomics have triggered a revolution in discovery-based research and systems biology to facilitate understanding of even the most complex biological systems such as the brain.
Molecular evolution is the process of change in the sequence composition of cellular molecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins across generations. The field of molecular evolution uses principles of evolutionary biology and population genetics to explain patterns in these changes. Major topics in molecular evolution concern the rates and impacts of single nucleotide changes, neutral evolution vs. natural selection, origins of new genes, the genetic nature of complex traits, the genetic basis of speciation, the evolution of development, and ways that evolutionary forces influence genomic and phenotypic changes.
Molecular genetics is a branch of biology that addresses how differences in the structures or expression of DNA molecules manifests as variation among organisms. Molecular genetics often applies an "investigative approach" to determine the structure and/or function of genes in an organism's genome using genetic screens.
Gene duplication is a major mechanism through which new genetic material is generated during molecular evolution. It can be defined as any duplication of a region of DNA that contains a gene. Gene duplications can arise as products of several types of errors in DNA replication and repair machinery as well as through fortuitous capture by selfish genetic elements. Common sources of gene duplications include ectopic recombination, retrotransposition event, aneuploidy, polyploidy, and replication slippage.
Sequence homology is the biological homology between DNA, RNA, or protein sequences, defined in terms of shared ancestry in the evolutionary history of life. Two segments of DNA can have shared ancestry because of three phenomena: either a speciation event (orthologs), or a duplication event (paralogs), or else a horizontal gene transfer event (xenologs).
Michael Ashburner was an English biologist and Professor in the Department of Genetics at University of Cambridge. He was also the former joint-head and co-founder of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
In biology, the word gene can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a basic unit of heredity and the molecular gene is a sequence of nucleotides in DNA that is transcribed to produce a functional RNA. There are two types of molecular genes: protein-coding genes and non-coding genes.
The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying, mapping and sequencing all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint. It started in 1990 and was completed in 2003. It remains the world's largest collaborative biological project. Planning for the project started after it was adopted in 1984 by the US government, and it officially launched in 1990. It was declared complete on April 14, 2003, and included about 92% of the genome. Level "complete genome" was achieved in May 2021, with a remaining only 0.3% bases covered by potential issues. The final gapless assembly was finished in January 2022.
Wen-Hsiung Li is a Taiwanese-American scientist working in the fields of molecular evolution, population genetics, and genomics. He is currently the James Watson Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Information Science and Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
The 2R hypothesis or Ohno's hypothesis, first proposed by Susumu Ohno in 1970, is a hypothesis that the genomes of the early vertebrate lineage underwent two complete genome duplications, and thus modern vertebrate genomes reflect paleopolyploidy. The name derives from the 2 rounds of duplication originally hypothesized by Ohno, but refined in a 1994 version, and the term 2R hypothesis was probably coined in 1999. Variations in the number and timings of genome duplications typically still are referred to as examples of the 2R hypothesis.
An overlapping gene is a gene whose expressible nucleotide sequence partially overlaps with the expressible nucleotide sequence of another gene. In this way, a nucleotide sequence may make a contribution to the function of one or more gene products. Overlapping genes are present in and a fundamental feature of both cellular and viral genomes. The current definition of an overlapping gene varies significantly between eukaryotes, prokaryotes, and viruses. In prokaryotes and viruses overlap must be between coding sequences but not mRNA transcripts, and is defined when these coding sequences share a nucleotide on either the same or opposite strands. In eukaryotes, gene overlap is almost always defined as mRNA transcript overlap. Specifically, a gene overlap in eukaryotes is defined when at least one nucleotide is shared between the boundaries of the primary mRNA transcripts of two or more genes, such that a DNA base mutation at any point of the overlapping region would affect the transcripts of all genes involved. This definition includes 5′ and 3′ untranslated regions (UTRs) along with introns.
The Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) is a scientific and academic organization founded in 1982 to support academic research in the field of molecular evolution. The society hosts an annual meeting, typically in June or July. It also supports satellite meetings throughout the year. The Society's first president was evolutionary biologist Walter M. Fitch. The current President is James McInerney.
Paul Martin Sharp is Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh, where he holds the Alan Robertson chair of genetics in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology.
Kenneth Henry Wolfe is an Irish geneticist and professor of genomic evolution at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland.
Melissa A. Wilson is an evolutionary and computational biologist and assistant professor at Arizona State University who studies the evolution of sex chromosomes.
Emma Caroline Teeling is an Irish zoologist, geneticist and genomicist, who specialises in the phylogenetics and genomics of bats. Her work includes understanding of the bat genome and study of how insights from other mammals such as bats might contribute to better understanding and management of ageing and a number of conditions, including deafness and blindness, in humans. She is the co-founder of the Bat1K project to map the genomes of all species of bat. She is also concerned with understanding of the places of bats in the environment and how to conserve their ecosystem.
Brandon Stuart Gaut is an American evolutionary biologist and geneticist who works as a Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine.
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