91406 - GENOMICA EVOLUTIVA UMANA

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, students will acquire theoretical and methodological knowledge essential to implement evolutionary genomics studies addressing the main processes that shaped present-day patterns of human biodiversity. Accordingly, the most up-to-date experimental approaches useful to generate genomic data will be described, along with the analytical methods aimed at processing them to infer the demographic and adaptive history of human populations.

Course contents

The course will provide theoretical knowledge and will form practical abilities essential to analyze genomic data and to interpret the obtained results for inferring processes of demographic expansion/contraction, isolation/gene flow and biological adaptation/disadaptation occured during the recent human evolutionary history. Evolutionary medicine approaches based on the application of the above-mentioned analyses and aimed at investigating the biomedical implications of human genomic and phenotypic variation will be also presented. 

The course contents will be organized according to the following arguments:

1. Principles of evolutionary genomics

2. Experimental approaches for the generation of genomic data

3. Models describing the evolution of neutral genomic variation of human populations

4. Analytical methods to infer the demographic history of human populations from genomic data

3. Models describing the action of natural selection on the human genome

4. Analytical methods to infer the adaptive history of human populations from genomic data

5. Biomedical implications of human genomic varibility

The last part of the course (1 CFU) will be devoted to perform exercises with softwares/pipelines of analyses to process genomic datasets and to apply some of the inferential methods previously described.

Readings/Bibliography

Slides of the lectures, as well as scientific articles and review papers possibly useful to deepen some of the arguments discussed during the course, will be shared with the students by means of dedicated tools (e.g. Virtuale, Microsoft Teams).

For students who want to further deepen some topics the following book is suggested:

Jobling, Hollox, Hurles, Kivisild, Tyler-Smith. 2014. Human Evolutionary Genetics (II edition). Garland Science, Taylor & Francis Group.

Teaching methods

5 CFU will be supplied by means of lectures.

1 CFU will be supplied by means of exercises with softwares/pipelines of analyses to process genomic datasets.

Assessment methods

The mark will be obtained by means of a one-hour written exam made up of a combination of multiple-choice and open questions.

Teaching tools

Slides of the lectures and scientific articles will be shared with the students by means of dedicated tools (e.g. Virtuale, Microsoft Teams).

Datasets and softwares used to perform exercises will be stored on a computing server to which the teacher will connect to show the different steps of the described analyses.

Students could use the R software on their own laptops to perform graphical representation of the results obtained by evolutionary genomics analyses.

Office hours

See the website of Marco Sazzini

See the website of Alessio Boattini