I have recently completed my Honours research with the Bielawski Lab

• B.Sc. with Combined Honours in Biology and Physics, Dalhousie University (2013)

Codon-based models of evolution have become progressively more complex and useful over the past few decades. The concept of a covarion process of selection switching, introduced by Fitch and Markowitz (1970), has yet to be widely implemented. My research involves using the re-implementation of a covarion-like model that was no longer available to the scientific community (Guindon et al., 2004) to conduct a large-scale analysis of data sets of mammal and yeast to expand knowledge of the prevalence and importance of selection switching in real gene data.

My reasearch objectives are:

(1) To determine if the covarion-like model is a better model of evolution for real data than a non-covarion M3 model.

(2) To determine if the signal for positive selection, especially at a small number of sites, is more detectable under the covarion-like model.

Large-scale analyses are necessary to understand the full effect of selection switching and the frequency at which it occurs in real gene data.