Research project title

Simulating the spread of mutations in a sexual population

Computing supervisor - Jason Noble
Domain supervisor - Dr Tom Tregenza
This interdisciplinary project involves using techniques from computer science to examine a question in theoretical biology. The project was suggested by Dr. Tom Tregenza of the School of Biology, and he will be the domain-stream supervisor.
The plan is to construct a simulation that tracks changes in gene frequencies in a large, sexually reproducing population. The specific theoretical question we want to look at concerns mutational load, i.e., the number of deleterious mutations that an individual carries. A complication is that mutations are typically recessive, meaning that their negative effects on fitness "lie in wait" and are not expressed until two such genes meet up in the same individual. Orthodox thinking in evolutionary genetics suggests that females will be on the lookout for any signs of high mutational load when selecting a mate. However, we suspect that the recessive nature of deleterious mutations may mean that there is not much for the females to look out for (i.e., the mutational load expressed in the phenotype is just the tip of the iceberg) and they would be better off ensuring that any males they mate with are genetically as distinct from them as possible, in order to lessen the chance that two recessive deleterious allelles will be combined in their offspring.
You don't need to be an expert on genetics to do this project: Dr. Tregenza and I will be happy to supply input on that front. You do need to be interested in a project that has scientific modelling at its core. You also need to be a capable programmer: the basic framework of the program that needs to be written is similar to a simple genetic algorithm. However, we want to work with large genotypes and large population sizes, which will require some cleverness in devising data structures (for the genotypes) and algorithms (for operators such as mutation and crossover) that will allow the program to run at an acceptable speed.
Feel free to contact me (jasonn@comp.leeds.ac.uk) if you are interested in the project and would like to learn more about it.