Hello

My name is Ania* Lorenc and I am a postdoc in Diethard Tautz's group in the department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany. My main research interests are evolution, changes in gene expression in evolution and recent adaptations. I'm working mostly with wild and inbred mice as a model system.

House mice colonized the whole world and in the last three hundred years also several non–inhabited subantarctic islands. They had to adapt to different climate and diet. My work concentrates on detecting signals of recent positive selection they've undergone and disentangle it from the bottleneck they went trough during migration.

Another interest of mine is evolution of imprinting. Parentally imprinted genes are genes for which only a single parental allele is expressed. One of the mainstream hypothesis of this (mostly mammalian) phenomenon is parental conflict. Studies of closely related rodent species, Peromyscus, suggest that imprinting might become incompatible between species quite quickly in evolution. However, as studying imprinting is extremely difficult, we do not know how it changes on small evolutionary scale. This is something I am trying to figure out.

Most of my work is done on whole-genome data - gene expression and SNP microarrays and genome/mRNA sequencing. It requires development of new bioinformatic methods and tools, but of course I'm using a lot of wonderful tools made by great people somewhere else - samtools, Tophat, Cufflinks, GATK, Bioconductor packages and many others. My everyday workshop is R, python, MySQL and Perl when necessary, of course with Unix.

In collaboration with Michael Dannemann and Michael Lachmann (both from MPI EVA, Leipzig) I developed MaskBAD, an R package that deals with the problem of species–incompatible probes on Affymetrix microarrays. MaskBAD is available in Bioconductor.

*this is the working version of Anna