Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 12: Focus Session: Statistical Physics-Based Methods in Molecular Evolution - organized by Alexander Schug and Martin Weigt (joint session BP/DY)

DY 12.5: Talk

Monday, March 12, 2018, 16:15–16:30, H 2013

Direct Coupling Analysis on the genome scale — •Erik Aurel — Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden

Direct Coupling Analysis (DCA) is a powerful tool to find pair-wise dependencies in large biological data sets. It amounts to inferring coefficients in a probabilistic model in an exponential family, and then using the largest such inferred coefficients as predictors for the dependencies of interest. A main success story has been predicting spatially proximate residues in protein structures from sequence data.

From a population genetics point of view DCA should be viewed as inferring epistasis, synergistic effects on fitness, from samples. I will discuss applications of DCA to the genome scale in bacteria and how that allows to find unexpected (and expected) dependencies between genes in trans i.e. that are not close on the genome.

This is joint work with many people, most recently with Chen-Yi Gao and Hai-Jun Zhou, available as arXiv:1710.04819.