Amelie Veron

Details

Lower-dorms, Clio, 25A, ext. 4191
Skype: amelie_veron
email: amelie.veron (at) laposte.net
Photos: my CSSS07 flickr set

Introduction

Hi all,

My name is Amélie and I am a postgraduate student of Evolutionary Bioinformatics in the group of Professor Bornberg-Bauer in Münster, Germany. I am interested in questions relating to evolution, and modeling and simulation in general. Here's a link to my webpage at the university.

I am also addicted to photography, reading, traveling and outdoor activities.

Short Biography

I am French and studied at the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) of Lyon, France from September 1998 to September 2004. During that time, I spent a year in Australia as an exchange student in the University of Technology, Sydney (and exploring Australia, too).

In September 2004 I obtained a "Diplome d'ingénieur" (which has the equivalent of a Masters) in Bioinformatics and Modelling.

I then went on to do my PhD studies in Germany in Erich Bornberg-Bauer's group in Münster. I spent the first year of my PhD in Manchester, in David Robertson's group. I am now at the end of my third year as a graduate student and hope to obtain my PhD sometime in September.

CSSS Santa Fe 2007 Home Faculty U.S. Visa Requirements Participants Schedule Readings Logistics Travel Projects & Working Groups Tutorials After Hours Photos T-shirt Design Forum Project Presentations Final Papers

Scientific Interests

My current research deals with studying, modeling and simulating the evolution of protein-protein interactions formed by transcription factors in regulatory networks.

Understanding the evolution of protein interaction networks and regulatory networks is still very much a work in progress. As several biological networks were found to display scale-free properties, where some proteins have many interactions and many have few, the growth and evolution of these networks have been explained by mechanisms such as preferential attachment or duplication followed by partial loss of interactions. All of these mechanisms represent a growth of the network element by element, or, in terms of biological networks, by single gene duplication. Although this type of growth makes sense in the case of the World Wide Web where sites are added one by one, it can be different for biological networks relying on genome evolution. Indeed, in most Eukaryotic lineages, traces of at least one whole genome duplication has been found that might have influenced the formation of biological networks such as regulatory networks or protein interaction networks. Moreover, none of the large-scale network studies took into account the phylogenetic relationships between network members, leaving the actual driving forces of network evolution unexplored.

Our focus has therefore been on the study of the dimerization networks formed by single families of transcription factors. In our group, one plant and three metazoan networks were thus investigated, combining phylogenetic reconstruction, protein domain analysis and interaction data from different species. Initial results favored the hypothesis of network growth by single gene duplication in at least two networks that presented scale-free-like properties, but it also appeared that the plant network had been deeply influenced by the known whole genome duplication events. The results of these analyses have now been published (see the publication list in the attached CV).

We are currently setting up a simulation experiment to determine if the heterodimerization of transcription factors could have been selected in Eukaryotes because it allowed for more regulatory diversity while only requiring a limited genome space. This simulation will be based on a genetic algorithm and Boolean networks, two techniques for which I have a special interest.

In order to identify eventual traces of adaptive evolution, I have recently become involved in studying the comparative molecular evolution of DNA sequences.

Non-scientific interests

I love taking and watching photos. Sooner or later, I'm going to talk to you about it, so I suppose I could start right now :D I'm only a digital photographer though, as I could never summon the strength to freely take photos and experiment with film. In any case, I got hooked up on flickr. I look forward to discovering the USA (first time visit for me) and New Mexico in particular .. there should be some great photo opportunity there !

I also love outdoor activities and although I won't have too much gear with me (walking boots and a water bottle ...) I hope we'll manage to organize some nice expeditions.

Oh and I've planned to stick around for one more week after the school, to get a chance to travel in the region and would be happy to travel with some of you :)