Margarida Maria Cardoso Moreira
mmoreira at uchicago.edu
Associations:
Ecology and Evolution, The University of Chicago, USA
GABBA graduate program, Universidade do Porto, Portugal
Faculdade de ciencias, Universidade do Porto, Portugal
Reseach:
Genetic variation is not distributed uniformly across the genome. It is a product of different mutational mechanisms and rates and the action of natural selection and drift. I am studying in detail patterns of standing variation of copy number mutations, i.e. mutations that either duplicate or delete DNA segments at least 25bp in size, in Drosophila. I am interested in understanding the relative contribution of the different mechanisms that create copy number polymorphisms and how they may lead to a non-random distribution of these mutations in the genome. At the same time I am examining how both positive and purifying selection also shape the genome wide distribution of copy number polymorphisms.