Vedran+Bozicevic

I am an ESR based at [|Ludwig-Maximilians Universitaet] (LMU) in Munich, Germany. My Supervisor is Prof. [|Wolfgang Stephan], head of the Population genetics group and the Evolutionary Biology Department at LMU.

I work on the project Selective sweep data and next generation sequence data analysis in collaboration with [|Eduardo Pareja] and [|Alexey Alekhin] from **Era7bioinformatics **, based in Granada, Spain.

I have a Diploma/MSc in Biology from the Faculty of Science at the [|University of Zagreb], Croatia. Before taking up the [|PhD position] at the University of Munich, I spent 2 years doing research in evolutionary genetics at the [|Ruđer Bošković Institute] (IRB), Croatia's largest public research institute.

My courses at the University included topics from Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, Animal and Plant Systematics, Biogeography, Genetics, and Molecular Biology. In my post-Diploma research I was involved in various topics bordering Evolutionary Genomics, Bioinformatics, Population Genetics and [|Genomic Phylostratigraphy], an Evo-Devo-like approach to the reconstruction of the macroevolutionary history of various animal organ systems. A research paper dealing with some of my research at IRB was recently published in the journal [|Frontiers in Zoology], titled "[|Phylostratigraphic profiles reveal a deep evolutionary history of the vertebrate head sensory systems]".

I presented the results of my PhD project at the PopGroup47 conference in Bath, UK (7-10 January, 2014), and at the Plant and Animal Genome XXIV conference in San Diego, US (8-13 January, 2016):





In short, I first analyzed SNPs associated to three complex traits (chill-coma recovery time, starvation resistance, and startle response) in //Drosophila melanogaster//, using next-gen sequence data from one African and three European populations. I found that the mean pairwise FST of these SNPs is significantly higher than that of the genomic background, suggesting a role of selection in shaping these complex traits. Later, I used Bayenv2 on SNPs across the genome to correlate the allele frequencies at those SNPs with various environmental variables.

The results showed a high likelihood of selection for cold tolerance-related genes in European environments. These results have been published in the journal Molecular Ecology, titled "Population genetic evidence for cold adaptation in European //Drosophila melanogaster// populations". The final chapter of my thesis deals with as yet unpublished data on selection for cold tolerance also working on the gene network level, i.e. groups of genes defined as gene ontology terms and metabolic pathways. I submitted my thesis on 20 February 2017.

Most recently, I co-authored a paper in the journal [|BMC Evolutionary Biology] analyzing genetic footprints of balancing selection in //Drosophila melanogaster//, titled "A genome-wide scan for genes under balancing selection in //Drosophila melanogaster//".