Genome evolution: error mitigation and the importance of population size

Classical theory holds that selection will be weaker when populations are small. This is held to explain why our genome has large introns and large intergenic distance, this being considered to be owing to the accumulation of weakly deleterious insertions and duplications. But is selection always weaker when population sizes are small? We have recently discovered that skews in codon and amino acid usage in proximity to exon intron junctions are more pronounced when population sizes are small. This we suggest is because exonic splice enhancer motifs are needed more to correct errors in splicing when errors rates are high, which is likely to be when introns are long. This project will a) test this hypothesis in a phylogenetically controlled manner b) ask whether splice related ESE usage is predicted both by the size of introns and population size and c) ask whether it is generally the case that genomic traits associated with generalized error-proofing are under strong selection when population sizes are small.

Training: use of mathematical models in an appropriate computer environment (Matlab and/or Mathematica); writing of scripts and web-crawlers (Tcl/Tk) for extraction and analysis of high-throughput data resources; R programming, MySql handling.