Laurence Hurst - Why there is more to gene evolution than protein function: splicing, dual-coding sequence and why it matters

Laurence Hurst is the Director of the Milner Centre for Evolution and past President of the UK’s Genetics Society.  In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.  He is an elected member of EMBO. His work seeks  to understand variation between species in gene and genome evolution with a view to medical applications.

In this talk he will ask whether the human genome is a perfect and well functioning machine or whether it is sloppy and error prone?  This question is key to understanding both how our genome works and to understanding which mutations might or might not cause disease.  He will consider this issue by considering how our genes evolve using evolution at synonymous and non-synonymous sites to test two different hypotheses.