BioBattalion webinar 7
Dr. Zachary Ardern, Postdoctoral Fellow, at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK delivered an exciting talk on, ‘How can life evolve new genes?’. In his talk, he highlighted the importance of overlapping genes and short genes like ORFs (Open Reading Frames) in microbial genomes. He explained the so-called ORFan genes which are found only in a small group of species or in one genome. He also pointed out the overlapping genes present in the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discussed its strong selection and the dynamic evolution of novel overlapping genes which act as a factor in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
He briefly talked about different models of gene origins and tools like RNA profiling, comparative genomics, evolutionary sequence analysis, etc. He introduced a tool, ‘OLGenie’ which detects overlapping genes by analysing excess constraints. Looking at genotype-phenotype maps between single-stranded sequences and the fault in the structure is an important part of the whole region of de-novo origin. He focused on ORF3a overlapping genes in SARS-CoV-2 and on finding the correlation between different reading frames. He concluded his talk by supporting the highly dynamic behaviour of genomes over time and understanding how this happened is fundamental in biology.
