Evolutionary genomics and proteomics, systems biology, bioinformatics, genetics.

Informations: Landry Laboratory

Let's imagine the following thought experiment. Take a simple organism such as yeast, which has 6000 genes, and try to turn it into a human, who has no more than 30 000 genes in its genome. It will soon become clear that the complexity of human biology does not take its roots in its number of genes but rather in the functional relationships among them.

In order to understand how complex biological systems evolve, it is therefore of paramount importance to elucidate the functional relationships among the genes in a genome. Our laboratory studies the evolution of genes and genomes.

We are investigating how genes interact with each other, how these relationships influence their evolution and how functional linkages change during evolution. In particular, we study gene expression regulatory networks and protein-protein interaction networks. Our current research projects examine: 1) How signaling networks change after gene duplication.  This will allow us to understand how cell regulation has become more complex in organisms with complex genomes and proteomes; and 2) How signaling network activity is affected by natural genetic variation. This will allow us to determine how cell signaling cascade activities vary in natural populations and can thus evolve by natural selection.

To reach these goals, we use bioinformatics, genomics and proteomics tools and the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model.  Our research has implication in medical biology. First, our findings will illuminate the role of regulatory proteins such as protein kinases in human diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease. Second, our results will serve as models for taking into consideration individual genetic make-ups in disease treatments, which is the starting point of personalized medicine.

BIO-2007: Biologie de la cellule