Evolution, Modularity, and Dynamics of Gene Regulatory Networks

This book studies the interplay between gene regulatory networks, phenotype and evolution via a combination of concept, theory and experiment. At the conceptual level, the author demonstrates thatgenes in regulatory networks group into surprisingly well-defined evolutionary modules with distinctive rates of evolution and conserved patterns of gene expression. At the theoretical level, the authordevelops a a novel probabilistic model for estimating the phylogeny of a pathway. Finally, the author analyses experimental data to reveal that genes sharing expression patterns (transcriptional modules) are not always evolutionarily conserved, but that genes sharing phylogenetic patterns (evolutionary modules) are typically co-expressed. These comparative approaches begin the attempt towardsa system-level understanding of how evolution is linked to the design and dynamics of regulatory networks, and how these networks functionacross timescales from microseconds to eons.

Autorentext

Born and raised in India, Dr. Amoolya Hardev Singh graduated with honors in Biology & Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and earned a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in computational biology. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany.