Larry Mays Seminar Series in Bioinformatics

UNC Charlotte’s Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics (BiG) hosts a weekly seminar series named after Dr. Lawrence Mays (Emeritus Faculty). The Larry Mays Seminars in Bioinformatics covers research within Bioinformatics, Genomics, and Computational Biology. Seminars are free and open to the UNC Charlotte community. The seminars are also a one-credit graduate course (BINF-6600 and BINF-8600 combined). Students enrolled in BINF 6600 or BINF 8600 can see course details on Canvas.

Seminars take place on Fridays at 2:30- 3:30 PM. Seminars are hosted from the Bioinformatics building, room 105, and on Zoom.

Zoom link

The Zoom information for the talk on Jan. 24, 2025, from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM (ET), will be provided in here minutes before the start of the seminar.

Spring 2025

The Larry Mays Seminars in Bioinformatics will be hosted by Dr. Denis Jacob Machado this Spring semester of 2025. Please email him at dmachado@charlotte.edu if you have any questions.

Jan. 24, 2025: “Jointly modeling the effects of evolutionary processes on genomic variation” with Dr. Parul Johri (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Population genomic inference currently does not account for the effects of selection across the genome. We propose that an appropriate evolutionary null model, when performing inference, should jointly account for the evolutionary processes known to be in constant operation in natural populations- genetic drift (as modulated by the demographic history of the population), heterogeneity in recombination and mutation rates, and importantly, selection against deleterious mutations. We show how not accounting for such constantly operating processes affects inference in population genetics. We demonstrate a statistical framework for jointly inferring the contribution of the relevant selective and demographic parameters. Our approach represents an appropriate baseline model for inference in population genetics at large, which is necessary to accurately assess the role of adaptive processes in shaping genomic variation. I conclude by discussing our recent efforts in building such evolutionary baseline models for human pathogens to better understand their demographic and selective histories.

Jan. 17, 2025: “Population Genomics in Action: The Fantastic Four Superwomen Leading the Charge in Speciation, Polyploidy, and Domestication Research” with Dr. Arun Sethuraman (San Diego State University)

Work in the Sethuraman Lab focuses on developing new statistical methods, software, and pipelines for understanding population structure, relatedness, speciation, and estimating evolutionary history from population genomic data. Here I will showcase the work of the Sethuraman Lab’s Fantastic Four Superwomen PhD students – (1) Tamsen Dunn’s polyploidy genome simulator and inference framework called SpecKS, (2) Margaret Wanjiku’s series of statistical tests to estimate ghost introgression into extant genomes, (3) Alexandra McElwee-Adame’s work on the genomics of domestication in hops (Humulus lupulus L.), and (4) Raya Esplin-Stout’s pipeline for simulating and testing thousands of coalescent demographic models for use with fastsimcoal28, called CoalMiner.

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Spring Semester Spekear Line-Up

17-Jan-25 (In Person): Dr. Arun Sethuraman

Dr. Arun Sethuraman (phonetic pronunciation: Uh-roon Say-thoo-rah-men) is an Associate Professor of Population Genetics and Bioinformatics at San Diego State University. Dr. Sethuraman is an evolutionary computational geneticist who develops new statistical methods, software, and pipelines to understand speciation, genomic ancestry, and human evolution out of Africa. He is originally from India, where he completed his Undergraduate studies in Computer Science prior to obtaining a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and Genetics from Iowa State University and an NIH Postdoctoral fellowship at Temple University with Dr. Jody Hey. More recently, he was a Faculty in the Biology Department at Cal State San Marcos. He is a recent recipient of the NSF CAREER and an NIH R15 AREA award and joined the Biology Department as a Faculty and Director of the Biological and Medical Informatics program at San Diego State University in the Fall of 2021. He also currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Genetics Society of America and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Scholars Program.

24-Jan-25 (In Person): Dr. Parul Johri

Dr. Parul Johri is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the Department of Biology and the Department of Genetics, with an affiliation in the Integrative Program for Biological and Genome Sciences. Before that, she was a postdoc at Arizona State University, advised by Jeffrey D. Jensen. She earned her PhD in the Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior program at Indiana University, Bloomington, under the supervision of Michael Lynch. Prior to that, she obtained a Master’s in Biology from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Delhi, India.

31-Jan-25 (In Person): Dr. Amy Gladfelter

Dr. Amy Gladfelter, a researcher at Duke University, combines innovative microscopy and computational approaches to study cellular organization and dynamics. Her work spans topics such as cytoplasmic patterning and the unique biology of fungi, revealing the intricate systems that govern cell behavior.

7-Feb-25 (Virtual): Dr. Sabah Ul-Hasan

Dr. Sabah Ul-Hasan is a scientist dedicated to understanding the microbes that inhabit unique ecosystems, including the venom glands of animals. Her research employs bioinformatics to uncover microbial diversity and its role in symbiosis, offering fresh perspectives on microbial ecology.

14-Feb-25 (In Person): Dr. Dominic A. Evangelista

Dr. Dominic A. Evangelista leads the Roach Brain Lab, where he investigates biodiversity through the lens of arthropods, particularly cockroaches. His research encompasses phylogenomics, evolutionary biology, and the biological importance of diversity in natural systems.

21-Feb-25 (Virtual): Dr. Sean Gibbons

Dr. Sean Gibbons develops cutting-edge computational and experimental methods to study host-microbe systems. His work advances our understanding of microbial communities, their metabolic interactions, and their roles in health and environmental systems.

28-Feb-25 (Virtual): Dr. Raúl González-Pech

Dr. Raúl González-Pech applies computational biology to the study of genome evolution in coral symbionts and related organisms. His research examines how symbiosis drives diversification, revealing the genetic underpinnings of these fascinating relationships.

7-Mar-25 (In Person): Dr. Joaquin C. B. Nunez

Dr. Joaquin C. B. Nunez combines computational, experimental, and multi-omics approaches to explore population genetics and evolutionary genomics. His work addresses questions about rapid evolution, host-pathogen dynamics, and the interplay between demography and selection.

14-Mar-25 (In Person): Dr. Harriet Alexander

Dr. Harriet Alexander uses computational approaches to explore oceanographic questions, focusing on the genetic diversity and ecological roles of plankton in marine ecosystems. Her research combines field studies and bioinformatics to better understand the changing ocean.

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Complete schedule for the Spring of 2025

Date	Speaker’s name	Speaker’s institution	Speaker’s website	Seminar type
17-Jan-25	Dr. Arun Sethuraman	Department of Biology, San Diego State University	http://www.sethuramanlab.com	In person
24-Jan-25	Dr. Parul Johri	University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill	https://www.johrilab.org	In person
31-Jan-25	Dr. Amy Gladfelter	Duke University, Cell Biology	https://gladfelterlab.net	In person
7-Feb-25	Dr. Sabah Ul-Hasan	University of California Merced	https://github.com/ivamp-consortium	Virtual
14-Feb-25	Dr. Dominic A. Evangelista	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	https://www.roachbrain.com	In person
21-Feb-25	Dr. Sean Gibbons	Institute for Systems Biology; University of Washington	https://gibbons.isbscience.org	In person
28-Feb-25	Dr. Raúl González-Pech	The University of Queensland, Institute for Molecular Bioscience	https://science.psu.edu/bio/people/rag5851	Virtual
14-Mar-25	Dr. Joaquin C. B. Nunez	University of Vermont	https://www.jcbnunez.org	In person
21-Mar-25	To be determined	To be determined	To be determined	Probably Virtual
28-Mar-25	Dr. Harriet Alexander	Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)	https://alexanderlabwhoi.github.io	In person
11-Apr-25	To be determined	To be determined	To be determined	Probably Virtual
18-Apr-25	To be determined	To be determined	To be determined	Probably Virtual
25-Apr-25	To be determined	To be determined	To be determined	Probably Virtual

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Past seminars

Fall 2024

The Fall 2024 seminars were organized by Dr. Abigail Leavitt LaBella (alabell3@charlotte.edu).

• August 30th (virtual): Dr. Emile Gluck-Thaler, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Starships: a new frontier for fungal biology
• September 6th (virtual): Dr. Alex Cope, Rutgers University
  • Integrating population genetic models with emerging functional genomic technologies to reveal the rules of proteome evolution
• September 13th (in person): Dr. Danillo Augusto, UNC Charlotte (Department of Biological Sciences)
  • Decoding the Immune System: Insights into Human Disease Susceptibility and Population Genetics
• September 20th (virtual): Dr. Jóse Vargas-Muñiz, Virginia Tech
  • Can targeting the fungal septin cytoskeleton improve existing antifungal therapies?
• September 27th (in person): Dr. Parul Johri, UNC Chapel Hill
• October 4th (in person): Dr. Lawrence Uricchio, Tufts University
• October 11th (virtual): Dr. Matthew Mead, Ginkgo Bioworks
• October 18th (virtual): Dr. Cullen Roth, Los Alamos National Laboratory
• October 25th (in person): Dr. Antonis Rokas, Vanderbilt University
• November 1st (in person): Dr. Xiaojun Ren, UNC Charlotte (Department of Biological Sciences)
• November 8th (in person): Dr. Liesl Jeffers-Francis, NC A&T
• November 15th (in person): Dr. Donald Fox, Duke University
• November 22nd (in person): Dr. Lauren Dineen & Dr. Colby Ford, UNC Charlotte

Spring 2024

• 1/19 (in person): Dr. Aaron Bivins, Lousiana State University
• 1/26 (remote): Dr. Liliana Dávalos, Stony Brook University
• 2/2 (in person): Dr. Morgan Carter, UNC Charlotte (CIPHER)
• 2/9 (in person): Dr. Yaniv Brandvain, University of Minnesota
• 2/16 (in person): Dr. Wynn Meyer, Lehigh University
• 2/23 (in person): Dr. Philipp Brand, Rockefeller University
• 3/1/24 (in person): Dr. Juan Vivero-Escoto, UNC Charlotte (CIPHER)
• 3/8/24: No seminar, Spring Break
• 3/15/24 (in person): Dr. Alejandro Damian-Serrano, University of Oregon
• 3/22/24 TBD
• 3/29/24: No seminar, Refresh Week
• 4/5/24: Dr. Bob Goldstein, UNC Chapel Hill
• 4/12/24: Dr. Meredith Yeager, National Cancer Institute
• 4/19/24: Dr. Elise Lauterbur, University of Arizona
• 4/26/24: No seminar, Spring Break

Zoom link for in-person attendance is available upon request. Please e-mail Dr. Laurel Yohe (lyohe1@uncc.edu) for the link.

Fall 2023

I. September 8, 2023: UNC Charlotte’s HPC student group will introduce a new training module for our research clusters.

The Charlotte HPC Group gave the 9/8 seminar. This new student organization is focused on advancing high-performance computational skills for users of all levels across campus. They do this through various means, including in-person workshops, peer support, and online Canvas training. This day, they briefly showed the new module and told us about some of the other activities they have on the horizon. This seminar was informative for people who are new to the cluster or don’t even have an account and for more experienced users who want to expand their knowledge and find additional resources. The module is already available to the 49er community. Please use this form to request additional information.

II. September 15, 2023: Dr. Ward Wheeler talks about multi-armed bandits, Thompson sampling, and machine learning in phylogenetic graph search, among other topics.

Dr. Ward Wheeler visited in person on 9/15 coming from the Division of Invertebrate Zoology American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA. In his talk, he talked about something cool called the multi-armed bandit problem in the context of phylogenetic graph searching. He uses a technique called Thompson sampling on a bunch of ‘search-bandits’ to help focus on search strategies that work best. This smart random sampling method turns out to be super effective in creating really good phylogenetic graphs, and it’s quicker than other random search methods. It’s like an unsupervised machine learning strategy that we can use on all sorts of phylogenetic data, even if we don’t know much about them beforehand.

III. September 22, 2023: Dr. Lucas Czeck talks about population genetic statistics for the next generation of pool sequencing.

In recent decades, so-called Evolve-and-Resequence (E&R) experiments have become a popular approach to survey rapid evolution of populations over multiple generations. These experiments allow us to measure shifts in the allele frequencies of a population in response to new or shifting environmental conditions, such as a changing climate.

Pool-sequencing of several individuals at once is a cost-effective and efficient tool to obtain reliable allele frequencies from a population of thousands to hundreds of thousands of individuals, and is often used in E&R experiments. However, specialized tools to efficiently analyze these data that take sampling noise stemming from the pool-sequencing approach into account were lacking. We developed two software tools to overcome statistical and bioinformatic challenges arising in this context.

First, we present grenepipe, a workflow from raw sequencing data of individuals or pooled populations to genotypes (variant calling) and population allele frequencies. The pipeline automates trimming, mapping, variant calling, and quality control, with a selection of popular software tools in each of these steps, and produces variant calls and frequency tables. While generally applicable to individual sample data, it offers specialized steps for pool-sequencing. Our software downloads all dependencies and runs all steps automatically using a single command line call, and parallelizes processing for computer cluster environments, allowing large datasets to be analyzed efficiently.

Second, to enable inferences of evolutionary signatures from frequency data, we created grenedalf, a C++ command line tool to compute population genetic statistics. It computes unbiased statistics of Fst, Pi, Tajima’s D with pool-sequencing data, far outperforming alternative tools, and fixing long-standing issues in the existing tools. Further it offers novel data exploration tools such as windowed allele frequency spectrum visualizations based on the allele frequencies, and built-in data filters and manipulations. Apart from its speed, it offers many convenience options, such as reading all standard file formats.

These tools are designed for scalability and ease-of-use with contemporary file formats, which we showcase using the GrENE-net.org project, a large-scale Evolve-and-Resequence experiment with Arabidopsis thaliana from across the world. We will present some preliminary results form that experiment, showcasing the use of the above tools, as well as demonstrating how E&R experiments can be used to investigate rapid evolution under differing environmental conditions such as caused by climate change.

Recommended publications:

• Grenepipe paper.
• Grenedalf preprint (submitted to Bioinformatics).

IV. September 29, 2023: Dr. Cathy Moore (Biosafety Officer at UNC Charlotte’s Division of Research) gives a special presentation.

Dr. Cathy Moore provided Biosafety Training for Graduate Students.

Dr. Moore is the University contact for:

• Handling and working with biological agents on campus
• Institutional Biosafety Committee protocol review and approval process
• Risk assessment and risk mitigation for biological agents and materials
• Use of select agents
• Dual Use of Research Concern
• Biosafety training courses and requirements
• Microbiological and Biomedical facilities renovation and design

V. October 6, 2023: Dr. Viviana Monje-Galvan (University at Buffalo) talks about an atomistic view of protein-lipid interactions at the cell membrane interface.

• Talk description: My research group uses all-atom molecular dynamics to study lipid-lipid and lipid-protein interactions. One of our goals is to determine the role of specific lipid species in disease mechanisms. We specialize in developing realistic membrane models that reproduce the physical environment of a given organism or cell organelle using key lipid species for that particular membrane. In this talk, I will present a protein-membrane study in the context of hepatitis C. Specifically, the molecular signature that results upon protein binding and the associated local membrane response when different lipid species are used to model the membrane. These results help us understand the lateral reorganization of lipids around proteins and the potential impacts of chronic hepatitis C and lipid redistribution, particularly near fat storages of the cell.
• Short Bio: Dr. Monje-Galvan is originally from Bolivia; she completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Chemical Engineering at the University of Maryland-College Park. She completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago, where she continued strengthening her background in computational biophysics. She started her lab at the University at Buffalo in January 2021, where she leads a diverse group of graduate and undergraduate students. She is actively involved with AIChE and the Biophysical Society, as well as her university, in efforts to promote the participation of women and minorities in science and engineering. She is a board member of LatinXinChE, an affinity group within MAC AIChE, AIChE CoMSEF, and is an active volunteer with the Society for Biophysicists of Latinamerica (SoBLA).

VI. October 13, 2023: Dr. Muhammad Iqbal Qureshi (Public Health Reference Laboratory and Khyber Medical University) gives a talk entitled “Genetic Recombination Potentially Drives Astrovirus Diversity in Camelids.”

VII. October 20, 2023: Dr. Brian Cleary (Assistant Professor at Boston University’s College of Engineering) discusses new technologies and algorithmic experimental designs to study intracellular and intercellular circuits.

VIII. November 3, 2023: Dr. Carla Osthoff Ferreira de Barros (National Laboratory of Scientific Computing, Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation) gives a seminar on developing efficient scientific gateways for supercomputer environments supported by deep learning models.

Dr. Carla Osthoff Ferreira de Barros graduated in Electrical Engineering from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro with a master’s and a doctorate in Computer Engineering Systems from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is currently a researcher in the area of High-Performance Computing at the National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC), a professor at the Multidisciplinary Graduate Program at LNCC, a member of the Consultative Committee of the Supercomputer Santos Dumont, coordinates the LNCC National Center for High-Performance Processing (CENAPAD), and the High-Performance Processing Sector of LNCC, which has several collaborative projects in the area of High-Performance Computing. Her research focuses on High-Performance Computing, Parallel Programming, and scientific application performance optimizations.

IX. November 17, 2023: Dr. Grace Wyngaard talks about chromatin diminution and genome stability in a talk that unravels the role of transposable elements in a remarkable adaptation in copepods

Dr. Grace Wyngaard has been working at the “fringes” of science – chromatin diminution in copepods, spending most of her career at James Madison University. This allowed her to pursue what she was most interested in… and only what she was most interested in. It allowed her to take big risks in testing and developing novel hypotheses because she did not have to keep a large lab machine operating each year. In her talk, Dr. Wyngaard will share with us the results of a career in science in which she could work slowly and steed to produce astonishing outcomes.

X. December 1, 2023: Dr. Joshua David Campbell, from Boston University, will give a talk about his work using computational biology and bioinformatics with applications ranging from identifying early drivers of lung cancer to developing therapeutics for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)

Dr. Joshua D. Campbell is an Associate Professor at Boston University (Division of Computational Biomedicine, Department of Medicine). He is also a member of the BU-BMC Cancer Center and an affiliate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He has received the Boston University Ralph Edwards Career Development Professorship and LUNGevity Career Development Award. He is also a Boston University Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) KL2 Scholar.

Dr. Campbell’s research interests include computational biology and bioinformatics applied to identifying early drivers of lung cancer. He is also interested in the therapeutic development and pathogenesis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), the 3rd leading cause of death globally (updated in December 2023).