Anna-Sophie Fiston-Lavier

Anna-Sophie Fiston-Lavier is an Associate Professor (with tenure) at the Institute of Science of Evolution in Montpellier. Anna's research is focused on the impact of structural variation and repetitive elements on genome function and evolutionary adaptation. While in the Petrov Lab (2008-2013) Anna developed the T-lex package for TE discovery, annotation, and population analysis using NGS data and worked on a number of projects focused on TE function and evolution. She received her Ph.D. from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris under the guidance of Hadi Quesneville in 2008. She investigated the evolutionary dynamics of Transposable Elements (TEs) and their impact on genome structure and evolution combining comparative genomic and phylogenomic approaches. She showed that the gene density is the main force that shapes the TE sequence evolution in Arabidopsis thaliana. Her analysis of segmental duplications in Drosophila melanogaster contributed to the proposal of a mechanistic model of segmental duplication formation based on non-allelic homologous recombination. She provided evidences of TE role in the duplication formation Fiston-Lavier et al Genome Research 2007. Inferring the evolutionary events that have led to the formation of a new operon-like cluster from A. thaliana, she also showed the role of TEs in the formation and the maintenance of duplications Field, Fiston-Lavier et al PNAS 2011. Anna's research project is to investigate the contribution of TEs on genome adaptive evolution developing accurate and powerful computational tools for TE dynamic analysis. She started designing an interactive tool to estimate the recombination rate along the D. melanogaster genome sequences Fiston-Lavier et al Gene 2010. Using this tools, she were able to investigate the TE evolutionary dynamics in Drosophila Petrov, Fiston-Lavier et al MBE 2011. She then developed a computational pipeline for TE annotation in population using next-gen sequencing data Fiston-Lavier et al NAR 2010.