During evolution, DNA sequences accumulate mutations, resulting in genetic diversity. Mutations are subject to the filtering of natural selection, and standing patterns and levels of DNA variability contain invaluable information about the evolutionary history of genes, genomes and organisms. Research in the lab broadly focuses on understanding why different genes are subject to different evolutionary forces (e.g. purifying and positive selection). With this aim, we make extensive use of large-scale comparative genomics and bioinformatics analyses.
