Andrew D. Kern
Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences
Research Areas: Computational Biology, Evolutionary Biology, Genetics
Population and Comparative Genomics
Genetic variation within and between species is jointly determined by the actions of selective, demographic, and stochastic processes. The recent explosion in whole genome data now provides adequate information for teasing apart to what extent each of these evolutionary forces has operated. Casual observation of the natural world suggests that adaptation is the rule rather than the exception, thus our lab group focuses on questions surrounding the identification of natural selection at the genomic level. To this end we employ computational, statistical, and experimental methods for studying genomic variation in an evolutionary framework. Our lab focuses attention on the human and Drosophila genomes, and runs the gamut of techniques from molecular to algorithmic.
Visit the Kern Lab website
Publications
A. D. Kern and D. J. Begun. 2008. Recurrent deletion and gene presence/absence polymorphism: telomere dynamics dominate DNA evolution at the tip of 3L in Drosophila. Genetics, in press.
D. J. Begun, A. K. Holloway, K. Stevens, L. W. Hillier, Y. P. Poh, M. W. Hahn, P. M. Nista, C. D. Jones, A. D. Kern, C. N. Dewey, L. Pachter, E. Myers, C. H. Langley. Population genomics: whole genome analysis of polymorphism and divergence in Drosophila simulans. PLoS Biology, 5(11): e310, 2007.
S. Katzman* , A. D. Kern* , G. Bejerano, G. Fewell, L. Fulton, R. Wilson, D. Haussler. Human genome ultraconserved elements are ultraselected. Science, 317:915, 2007.
* these authors contributed equally
The ENCODE consortium. The ENCODE pilot pro ject: functional annotation of 1% of the human genome. Nature, 447: 799-816, 2007.
K.S. Pollard, S. R. Salama, N. Lambert, M. A. Lambot, S. Coppens, J. S. Pedersen, S. Katzman, C. Onodera, A. Siepel, A. D. Kern, C. Dehay, H. Igel, M. Ares, P. Vanderhaeghen, and D. Haussler. An RNA gene expressed during cortical development evolved rapidly in humans. Nature 443: 167- 172, 2006.
M. W. Hahn and A. D. Kern. Comparing Centrality and Essentiality in Three Eukaryotic Protein-Interaction Networks. Mol. Biol. Evol.22: 803D806, 2005.
A. D. Kern and D. J. Begun. Patterns of polymorphism and divergence from non-coding sequences of D. melanogaster and D. simulans: evidence for non-equilibrium processes Mol. Biol. Evol. 22:51D 62, 2005.
A. D. Kern and F. A. Kondrashov. Mechanisms and Convergence of Compensatory Evolution in mammalian tRNAs. Nature Genetics 36:1207D1212, 2004.
A. D. Kern, C. D. Jones, and D. J. Begun. Genomic effects of nucleotide substitution in Drosophila simulans. Genetics 162:1753D1761, 2002.