IBM Israel Research Seminars

The exponentially accumulating molecular data was supposed to bring us closer to resolving one of the most fundamental issues in biology - the reconstruction of the tree of life. This tree should encompass the evolutionary history of all living creatures on earth and trace back to the most ancient microbial ancestor few billions of years back. However, contradictorily, this abundance of data only blurs our traditional beliefs and seems to make this goal harder than initially thought. This is largely due to lateral gene transfer, the passage of genetic material between organisms not through lineal descent. Evolution in light of lateral transfer tangles the traditional universal tree of life, turning it into a network of relationships. Lateral transfer is a significant factor in microbial evolution and is responsible to the mechanism by which bacteria develop resistance to antibiotic.

In this talk I will survey current methods designed to cope with lateral transfer in conjunction with vertical inheritance and present some new developments.

About the Speaker
Sagi Snir received the BA degree from Bar Ilan University at Israel majoring in computer science and economics. He received the MSc and PhD degrees in computer science from the Technion, Israel. After PhD he was a postdoctoral researcher at the math and CS departments in UC Berkeley and is now a senior lecturer at Netanya college and a research fellow at Inst. of Evolution in Haifa U. Before working on the PhD, he worked in various information technologies companies, including IBM Haifa Research Lab. His main research interest is computational biology and, in particular, genomics and phylogenetics.