Parul Johri, PhD (Assistant Professor of Biology and Genetics) received a new R35 grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) for her project titled “Jointly modeling the effects of evolutionary processes on genomic variation”.
The work will result in a better understanding of how natural selection shapes genomic variation, as well as the development and application of methods that jointly account for multiple evolutionary processes. The first goal will be to generate a better estimate of the shape of the genome-wide fitness effects of new mutations. As lower rates of recombination result in stronger effects of selection, the second goal is to better understand how selection against deleterious mutations affects genome-wide patterns of variation in species that undergo high rates of self-fertilization and to develop methods that account for the effects of selection. The third goal is to apply methods to perform inference of demography and identification of recent selective sweeps in species with compact genomes, like those of Plasmodium falciparum and vivax.