Diogo Melo from the University of São Paulo will be presenting a Special Seminar on Thursday 14th August from 14:00–15:00 in D502.

Diogo is an Assistant Professor at the University of São Paulo, where he leads the Systems Biology, Genetics, and Evolution Lab. His research focuses on the evolution of genetic architecture: how it can influence or limit evolutionary trajectories, and how it is, in turn, shaped by natural selection. Diogo combines quantitative and population genetics, developmental and evolutionary biology, as well as functional genomics and computational modeling—making his work highly relevant to many of us in Zootis. You can learn more about his research on his website: https://damelo.net/  

Title: Reassessing modularity in gene co-expression networks: how modular are the modules?"

Abstract: Modularity is an important organizing concept in the study of complex traits. Similar traits are expected to co-vary together, while traits performing different functions are expected to not be associated with each other. This insight comes from a long history of studying morphological systems, where researchers have observed that functionally related structures tend to be more tightly integrated than structures serving different purposes. This modular framework has been applied more recently to genomic systems, including gene co-expression networks and metabolomics data. In gene co-expression networks, genes are connected based on the similarity of their expression patterns, with the expectation that co-expressed genes will form distinct assortative modules—groups where genes are more connected within the module than between modules. However, this application of a concept developed in a morphological context to genomics comes with assumptions that might not always be warranted. In this talk, I will discuss the many possible organizations of gene coexpression networks and how modern methods can help us uncover these complex structures. Most community detection algorithms used in genomics explicitly assume that genes are organized into these assortative modules, which guarantees that alternative network architectures will be overlooked. This presents a fundamental problem: by imposing modular organization a priori, we may be missing important biological information about how gene networks are actually structured.

Welcome!