Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research & Albert Katz International School for Desert Studies

Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Camp Evolution II

Please REFRESH to view the latest version of the this page-

Last updated April 17, 2006

Sede-Boker Campus, April 2-6, 2006

Organizer: Ariel Novoplansky

Overview	Language	Camp Evolution I - Last year's workshop
Preliminary outline	Campus map	NEW!- photos
Time table	Getting there	Enquires

The workshop featured a lecture series by Fyodor Kondrashov, Section on Ecology, Behavior and Evolution, Division of Biological Sciences, University of California at San Diego, USA on

Evolutionary and Ecological Genomics

as well as presentations by other participants.

The workshop dwelled on evolutionary aspects of genomics that are, or soon will be, relevant to ecological studies.

A. Lectures

1. Studying selection at the molecular level (4 hours):

• How negative selection reveals functionality in the genome
• How the study of Darwinian selection at the molecular level may lead to generalizations regarding ecological adaptations.

2. The role of gene duplication in Evolution of genomes and ecological adaptations (3 hours).

Theoretical expectations of selection pressure changes due do gene duplications

Examples of adaptive gene duplications to changes in the environment

3. Gene expression analysis in ecology (2 hours)

How many and what kinds of genes change their expression when the environmental conditions vary

4. "Environmental sequencing” (2 hours).

A review of successful and failed projects of environmental sequencing

What environmental conditions to consider when choosing what to sequence

5. Genomics and recent speciation (2 hours).

Using genomics tools to study recent speciation events

B. Practical

1. Introduction to Perl (2 hours): the basics of working with sequences.

Getting familiar with hashes, subroutines and the matching operator

2. Common tools in studying strength of selection and sequence homologies (2 hours): PAML, MEGA, BLAST, BLAT).

Running programs but focusing on their integration in Perl

3. Essential genomic data bases (1 hour): GenBank and UCSC.

How and where to choose the data you need, and what is available

The practical sessions will be held throughout the workshop. The goal is that participants will be able to independently carry out genome-wide studies using publicly-available sequence and expression databases.

Getting to Midreshet Ben-Gurion and the Albert Katz International School for Desert Studies

• Reaching Beer-Sheva from Tel-Aviv is best done by trains. Timetable of trains. From Jerusalem you should better take the Egged direct bus. Timetable of busses.
• To Midreshet Ban-Gurion take Metropolin bus #60 from Beer-Sheva's Egged Central bus station. Timetable of Metropolin busses.
• Please use this map to get to the Albert Katz International School for Desert Studies.

Timetable

	Sat, April 1	Sun, April 2	Mon, April 3	Tues, April 4	Wed, April 5	Thurs, April 6
08:00 – 08:20		Arrival and check-in	Breakfast	Breakfast	Breakfast	Breakfast
08:30 – 10:15			Evolutionary and Ecological Genomics	Evolutionary and Ecological Genomics	Evolutionary and Ecological Genomics	Evolutionary and Ecological Genomics
10:15 – 10:45	Early arrival
10:45 – 12:30
12:30 – 13:30			Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch
14:00 – 18:00		Evolutionary and Ecological Genomics	Excursion: Nachal Karkash	Excursion: Ein Yorkeam	Excursion: Nachal Ardon- Har Harut	Checkout
19:00 – 20:00		Dinner	Dinner	Dinner	Party Dinner
20:30 – 21:30		Osnat Gillor BIDR, BGU The rules of microbial warfare: aspects in bacteriocins ecology and evolution	Yaakov Ben-Natan Superlearn Ltd Applications of machine learning in Evolution, genetics and ecology	Rivka Hadas Volcani The Israeli Gene Bank for Agricultural Crops	Elhanan Borenstein TAU Adaptive Evolution of Mutational Robustness: Moving Towards Staying Put
21:30 - ??		Social.	Social	Social	Social

BACK TO TOP