PhD defence by Sergei Kliver

Sergei Kliver will be defending his PhD thesis on the 20th June, 1315, in Kommunehospital room 7-1-46.  

Entitled “Chromosomics of the selected Caniformia species” it broadly deals with his work on comparative analysis of Caniformia species.  An abstract is at the end of this email.

Abstract

Chromosomics is a relatively new area within genomics bridging a deep gap between bioinformatics and cytogenetics, the abyss between genome assemblies and karyotypes, the canyon between scaffolds and chromosomes. Such a connection was established in the every chapter of this thesis, and it even affected the title, the first word of which is “Chromosomics”. The rapidly increasing spread of chromosome level genome assemblies is promoting research in this area, and the first chapter of the thesis discusses additional benefits that arise from this.

This thesis is focused on Caniformia, a taxon with a long history of cytogenetic studies. By combining previously available data with new genome assemblies, I aimed to investigate how evolution has shaped the intrachromosomal structure of the genomes within this lineage. In my first steps, described in chapters II-IV, only a few closely related species were studied, but even at this stage several long inversion were found. This finding forced me to expand to twenty six species, and perform my analyses on a new level. As a result, a previously unknown burst of inversions prior to the radiation of the Mustelidae was revealed, as described in the last chapter. Many of these exceed 10 Mbp and encompass a considerable part of their genomes. On some chromosomes, chains of the overlapping inversions formed complex rearranged structures. These different set of the rearrangements have reshaped the genome of the red panda (the only extant survivor of Ailuridae) since its last MRCA with Mustelidae. Whether these dramatic changes were triggered by the same external event or not, remains as an open question for future studies.

His assessment committee are Assoc Prof Hernan Morales (chair), Prof Thomas Bataillon (Aarhus University) and Assoc Prof Tom van der Valk (Stockholm)

The defense will also be on zoom: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/64170511574

Meeting ID: 641 7051 1574