Evolutionary trajectory of a protein dihedral angle

This is the homepage of the Evolutionary Bioinformatics group in the Department of Statistics, Oxford, headed by Prof. Jotun Hein.

Interested in joining or working with the group? Check out our projects page, or contact Jotun at hein@stats.ox.ac.uk.

Current research areas

Underlying themes are evolution, population genetics, comparative genomics, integrative genomics and systems biology.  Work includes developing theoretical models, algorithmic and statistical treatment of open problems, data analysis, and implementation of methods developed. Within these fields we focus on:

Sequence Analysis and Statistical Alignment

Although this is a classic field, there are still plenty of challenges due to the vast increase in available sequence data. We are especially interested in stochastic models of evolution that includes structural information and insertion-deletions.

Phylogenies, Populations and Recombination

Another classic field with many new questions arising from new types of data.

Models of the Origins of Life

Disease studies are quickly moving from looking at individual kinds of data (variation data, genomes, expression data, proteomics…) to attempting a combined analysis.  This poses many new modelling tasks, but also questions about the limitations of the present data sets in terms of functional characterization of individual mutations.

Comparative Biology

With the great successes of comparative genomics and population genetics, it is clear that a long series of data is appearing on higher levels, like networks, shape, behaviour and more.  These must be modelled evolutionarily to be analysed properly.  A large coming field is how to transfer knowledge from model organisms to humans.