KGI Professor Helps Identify More Reliable ‘Evolutionary Clocks’
CLAREMONT, Calif., Sept. 28 /PRNewswire/ — Keck Graduate Institute (KGI) today announced that Dr. Alpan Raval, KGI assistant professor, has published a paper in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters that breaks new ground in the study of molecular evolutionary biology.
“Dr. Raval’s work will help evolutionary scientists with the difficult task of explaining how much we share in common genetically with other species,” said Sheldon Schuster, PhD, KGI’s president. “This work will create new pathways of research that could ultimately lead to improvements in human health by identifying the best models in which to study human disease.”
Raval’s paper, Molecular Clock on a Neutral Network, describes a new mathematical method that allows scientists to more accurately gauge genes which can reveal how closely species are related to one another.
“Molecular clocks” are genes or proteins whose mutations explain lineage and divergence between species, but the clocks often prove erratic due to variation in the number of mutations. Raval has formulated mathematical limits that characterize the reliability of molecular clocks as tools for evolutionary researchers. The key is locating the ideal protein in DNA sequences to use for clocks, and Raval’s work opens the way for scientists to do just that.
Raval teaches computational molecular biology, stochastic methods in computational biology, computer programming, machine learning and biostatistics. As a computational biologist, his work has included devising machine learning methods for protein fold recognition, theoretical models for gene networks, and protein function elucidation using gene and protein network data. He earned his PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park, and his MSc in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India.
KGI BACKGROUND
Educating the future leaders of the bioscience industry, Keck Graduate Institute (KGI) offers an interdisciplinary graduate education through its Master of Bioscience (MBS) degree program and its Ph.D. program in Applied Life Sciences. Using team-based learning and real-world projects, KGI’s innovative curriculum seamlessly combines applied life sciences, bioengineering, bioethics and business management. KGI also has a robust research program concentrating on the translation of basic discoveries in the life sciences into applications that can benefit society. KGI is a member of The Claremont Colleges, located in Claremont, California.
Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences is dedicated to education and research aimed at translating into practice, for the benefit of society, the power and potential of the life sciences.
Keck Graduate Institute
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