WHAT MAKES US HUMAN?

Our current focus is studying the impact of genomic structural variation in human evolution. Genomic structural variants (SVs) involve differences in copy number (i.e., deletions and duplications), orientation (i.e., inversions) or genomic location (i.e., translocations) of large segments of DNA between individuals. We believe that SVs represent a huge and unexplored area of evolutionary genomics that is ripe for studies focusing on their impact on human disease and biology.