Series of interviews were written to present each PI of the CIG.
Most of them are already available on the new CIG Report’s website, and every week we will be displaying one of them in the newsletter.
“What’s the difference between a Fiat and a Toyota?”
Comparative genomics provides answers
When asked how many non-viral genomes have been sequenced up to now, Prof. Christophe Dessimoz – head of the Computational Evolutionary Biology and Genomics group at the CIG – does not need to think very long: “Definitively in the range of several tens of thousands”. Indeed, as a result of major technological advantages in the field, genomic sequencing has been advancing at a pace only very few would have dared to predict some decades ago. This technological revolution has given an immense impetus to comparative genomics. Prof. Dessimoz and his team are at the forefront of integrative and comparative genomics, situated at the interface between biology and computer science. They are seeking connections between genes and genomes and trying to understand evolutionary relationships between organisms across the Tree of Life.
“From elephant to butyric acid bacterium – it is all the same”
Albert Jan Kluyver, Dutch biochemist (1926)