Mathematical Biology Seminar: Antoine Baker

The replication process is known to be strand asymmetric: it requires the opening of the DNA double helix and acts differently on the two DNA strands, which generates different mutational patterns and in turn different nucleotide compositions on the two DNA strands (compositional asymmetry). During my PhD thesis, we modeled the spatio-temporal program of DNA replication and its impact on the DNA sequence evolution. I will show how this model helps understand the relationship between compositional asymmetry and replication in eukaryotes and explains the patterns of compositional asymmetry observed in the human genome. During the last part of my talk, I will present our on-going project: inferring the spatio-temporal replication program from experimental replication kinetics data