Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. From now until the launch of Oxford Events, new events cannot be published or edited on OxTalks while all existing records are migrated to the new platform. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period.
From 16th, Oxford Events will launch on a new website: events.ox.ac.uk, and event submissions will resume. You will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
Biological sequences in evolutionary trajectories of are propelled by mutation and whittled away by selection to maintain function. Present-day sequences can therefore be regarded as the outcomes of millions of evolutionary experiments that record functional constraints in the genotype-phenotype map. In this talk we will introduce computational methods that, when combined with recent growth in sequence databases, quantify evolutionary constraints in terms of evolutionary couplings between residues. We have applied these tools to predict (i) accurate 3D structures of proteins, RNA and complexes, (ii) conformational order and plasticity in ‘disordered’ proteins and (iii) quantitative effects of mutations on organism fitness. These computational approaches address the challenge of inferring causality from correlations in genetic sequences but can be applied more widely to other biological information such as gene expression or dynamics, cellular phenotypes or drug response.
