Dresden 2011 – scientific programme

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SKM-SYBE: SKM-Symposium Statistical Physics and Biological Evolution

SKM-SYBE 1: Statistical Physics and Biological Evolution

SKM-SYBE 1.3: Invited Talk

Friday, March 18, 2011, 11:30–12:00, TRE Ma

Macroscopic laws in bacterial genome evolution — •Erik van Nimwegen — Biozentrum, Universität Basel, Switzerland

Over the last century an enormous effort has been invested into the modeling of evolutionary dynamics, but validation of these models with real data have been limited for several reasons: Until the 1950s it was simply not known what the substrate of natural selection was and until recently data was limited to small fractions of the genomes of a small number of organisms. In addition, none of the existing evolutionary models capture all the complexities of evolution in the real world, so that it is generally unclear which predictions of evolutionary models one would expect to observe in real world data.

However, recently the number of publically available complete genome sequences has grown from one (in 1995) to currently almost 1500. This has offered researchers, for the first time, a chance to identify ‘laws’ of genome evolution not from general theoretical considerations, but directly by analysis of the available genome data. Indeed such studies have recently uncovered several remarkable macroscopic laws in genome structure and evolution. These quantitative laws concern features such as the distribution of evolutionary rates and gene family sizes, the distribution of genes across different functional categories, and large-scale properties of regulatory networks. In this talk I will discuss some of these laws and their implications for our understanding of genome evolution in prokaryotes.