Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Genomics

Annelore Natran started her studies at HoGent campus Vesalius in 2013. She studied Biomedical Laboratory Technology. In her last year, she did her internship in the lab of Dirk Inzé, where she also wrote her bachelor's thesis.
In 2016, Annelore graduated and she also gained her first work experience in the Systems Biology of Yield lab. She mainly works on phenotypic and genotypic techniques with Arabidopsis but also has some experience with maize plants.
In 2020, she joined the group of Yves Van de Peer to work on Spirodela.

My research interests focus on the ecological and evolutionary significance of polyploid (as well as Whole Genome Duplication, WGD). There is a large body of literature depicting the functional and evolutionary innovation and potential conferred by WGD, while some report that WGD could be detrimental and deadly. The debate of the ecological and evolutionary significance of polyploidy suggests that the consequence of being a polyploid largely depends on the ecological condition that the polyploid is inhabiting and coping with. Recent studies show that there is a nonrandom pattern of WGD occurence across the evolutionary timeline of diverse species, for example a recent research elucidated that a wave of successful genome duplications is associated with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary in the analysis of 41 plant genomes. The association between WGD and massive extinction events (glaciation events, etc.) provides strong evidence that WGD is an important evolutionary force for survival and success, especially in extreme environments. For now, the confirmed association reported in literature is quite limited in taxa sampling and reliability. I'm trying to build a reliable WGD dating system to explore connections between WGD and massive extinction events in more lineages (mainly angiosperms). The commonness of WGD accumulating around the boundary of massive extinction events across the tree of life would be a powerful argument for the selective advantage of WGD in harsh environments.