Aoife McLysaght | |
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| Alma mater | Trinity College Dublin (BA, PhD) |
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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.
In biology, a mutation is an alteration in the nucleic acid sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA. Viral genomes contain either DNA or RNA. Mutations result from errors during DNA or viral replication, mitosis, or meiosis or other types of damage to DNA, which then may undergo error-prone repair, cause an error during other forms of repair, or cause an error during replication. Mutations may also result from insertion or deletion of segments of DNA due to mobile genetic elements.
Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of molecular 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 describes how inherited DNA and/or RNA change over evolutionary time, and the consequences of this for proteins and other components of cells and organisms. Molecular evolution is the basis of phylogenetic approaches to describing the tree of life. Molecular evolution overlaps with population genetics, especially on shorter timescales. Topics in molecular evolution include the origins of new genes, the genetic nature of complex traits, the genetic basis of adaptation and speciation, the evolution of development, and patterns and processes underlying genomic changes during evolution.
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.
In genetics and bioinformatics, a single-nucleotide polymorphism is a germline substitution of a single nucleotide at a specific position in the genome. Although certain definitions require the substitution to be present in a sufficiently large fraction of the population, many publications do not apply such a frequency threshold.
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 has two meanings. The Mendelian gene is a basic unit of heredity. 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 only 0.3% of the 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 whole 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.
Jennifer Ann Marshall Graves is an Australian geneticist. She is Distinguished Professor within the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science, La Trobe University, Australia and Professor Emeritus of the Australian National University.
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 Stephen Wright.
Paul Martin Sharp is a British bioinformatician who is a 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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