Population Genomics Course

Learning Goals

• Identification of lineage-specific genomic changes of pathogens
• Estimate recombination, mutation, and selection in natural pathogen populations

Learning outcomes

• Be able to construct genome trees using genome-wide SNPs
• Use genome trees to identify orthologs and paralogs, and gene gains and losses
• Detecting recombination among bacterial genomes
• Use of coalescence tree to describe process of microbial genome evolution

Syllabus

Part 1. Introduction & Overview

• Lecture: 8:30-9:30
• Population processes
  • Recombination: Muller's Rachet; Hill-Roberson effect
  • Recombination and natural selection: Background selection & selective sweeps
• Bacterial population structure: B. burgdorferi in Northeast US
• Bioinformatics pipeline/protocol
• In-Class Exercise (15 min): Tree Puzzles

Part 2. Building genome phylogeny/Geographic structuring/Population growth?

• In-class exercise: 10:00-11:30
• Data set: cp26 plasmids from 23 B. burgdorferi sensu lato genomes
• Genome alignment: MUGSY & Alignment viewer: Gmaj
• Genome tree: FastTree
• Tree re-rooting: R package APE see syllabus
• Interactive tree viewer: trexonline

Part 3. Estimation of recombination rate

• In-class exercise: 2-3
• Data set: three pairs of sister-group cp26 plasmids
• LAMAC; LDhat
• Own script for sister-group counts? (D statistics)

Part 4. Simulation of natural selection & Summary

• In-class exercise: 3:30-5
• ms, seq-gen; Genomes
• BacSim