The Skerman Lecture
Event Details
- Date:
- Tuesday, 05 July 2022
- Time:
- 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
- Room:
- 03-206
- UQ Location:
- Steele Building (St Lucia)
- URL:
- https://scmb.uq.edu.au/event/session/9721
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Dr Suzanne Bedford
- Phone:
- 53900
- Email:
- research@scmb.uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences
Event Description
- Full Description:
- Speaker
Tom Williams is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Associate Professor in Molecular Evolution at the University of Bristol, UK.
His work focuses on studying the early evolution of life using phylogenetic and comparative genomic methods (that is, with bioinformatics, on a computer). The key questions relate to the nature of early life, the phylogeny of prokaryotes, the processes of microbial/genome evolution, and the origin of eukaryotic cells.
Abstract:
Some of the most fundamental unanswered questions in biology relate to the earliest stages of life’s evolution: the origin of proteins, genomes and cells, and the deep structure of the tree of life. With the advent of environmental genome sequencing, the modern diversity of life can be sampled more broadly and deeply than ever before. These data provide a rich new source of information with which to answer classic questions about the history of life, the nature of early cells, and the patterns and processes of evolution in deep time.
Progress also depends on the development of computational methods for inferring evolutionary trees, mapping gene origins, and reconstructing ancestral states that capture the complexity of genome data, and that can scale to make the most of the enormous quantities of data now available. In this talk, new work on phylogenomic methods and their application to the deepest branches of the tree of life, the nature of the last bacterial common ancestor, and the timescale for the diversification of bacterial and our own eukaryotic cells will be presented. Some of the biggest and most exciting questions about early life raised by this and other recent work will also be explored.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
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- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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