Research Areas

This group’s objective is to apply Genetics/Genomics and Computational Biology to the study of selection, adaptation and speciation, a more specific goal being that of developing a better understanding of how the environment affects the population genetics of wild organisms. This aim is achieved by the joint use of neutral and selected molecular markers, as well as through the study of the association of the genotype with the environment.
Understanding the genetics and genomics of the environmental change and its consequences for biodiversity and its preservation is the overall aim of this research group.

In close interaction with the above work and goals, third-party and in-house developed software, bioinformatics pipelines and data mining computational techniques are used to analyze the generated population-genetic, phylogenetic, and phylogeographic datasets. A more recent challenge in this direction is the analysis of the large datasets that we are about to generate using next-generation sequencing technology under a population genomics and gene discovery framework, to address the scientific questions above.

• Phylogenetics, Phylogeography and Biogeography

• Selection and Molecular Adaptation

• Association Studies

• Bioinformatics