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Quantitative Tools for Assessing the Correlated Evolution of Genes and Phenotypes: Application to Birds Color Patterns (Q-T-Birds)

Welcome to the Q-T-Birds project archival website. Q-T-Birds was an active postdoc project between 2022 – 2024 by Viktor Senderov (I am going to use the first person pronoun on this website) based in Hélène Morlon’s lab at the biology institute (IBENS) of the École normale supérieure, Paris, with collaborators from College de France.

Its initial aim was to develop a comparative phylogenetics method for molecular evolution that could highlight genes that are potentially key to the formation of color patterns across bird species. Here, you can download the project proposal, which is password-protected for confidentiality reasons.

During the course of the project we realized that the proposed modeling approach could accommodate any biological system, where we would like to link a molecular evolution process to a phenotypic evolution process, while incorporating phylogenetic information, and doing so in the context of a full gene, as opposed to on a site-by-site basis. So we refer to the model as the QT Model.

Furthermore, as a secondary objective, we set out to use the universal probabilistic programming language TreePPL, of which I am the main developer, to do the Bayesian analysis.

You can check out various research outputs of the project.

As of 2024-09-26 the current status of the project is paused, as I am unemployed. I am interested in an employment opportunity that would allow me to continue working on it or in transferring the project to a new lead. Contact me if you want to discuss either option.