Annie Chateau – assistant professor at the University of Montpellier 2 and researcher at LIRMM

• Dec. 15, 2016
• 11:00 s.t.
• room U10-146

Abstract: In recent years, many studies focused on the description and comparison of large sets of related bacteriophage genomes. Due to the peculiar mosaic structure of these genomes, few informative approaches for comparing whole genomes exist: dot plots diagrams give a mostly qualitative assessment of the similarity/dissimilarity between two or more genomes, and clustering techniques are used to classify genomes. Multiple alignments are conspicuously absent from this scene. Indeed, whole genome aligners interpret lack of similarity between sequences as an indication of rearrangements, insertions, or losses. This behavior makes them ill-prepared to align bacteriophage genomes, where even closely related strains can accomplish the same biological function with highly dissimilar sequences. In this work, we propose a multiple alignment strategy that exploits functional collinearity shared by related strains of bacteriophages, and uses partial orders to capture mosaicism of sets of genomes.