Barton Lab
Principal Investigator: John P Barton
Institution: University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA)
Primary Subfield: Molecular & Cell Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY Natural selection is central to many challenges in biology and medicine, from the emergence of drug resistance in pathogens to cancer evolution. Understanding selection can also aid in protein engineering and help identify clinically relevant mutations in human disease genes. Temporal genetic data — sequences and phenotypes sampled over time — can be an especially powerful tool for understanding selection because it allows us to observe evolutionary dynamics directly. But while temporal data from sources like pathogen surveillance, ancient DNA, and experimental evolution have grown tremendously in recent years, statistical analyses of these data remain challenging. My lab will continue to pioneer the development of new computational methods to learn from temporal genetic data, revealing variants and phenotypes under selection and harnessing this information for predictive models of evolution. Over the past five years, we have developed several approaches to quantify selection from temporal data. Thanks to the use of mathematical methods from statistical physics, our methods are fast and accurate despite the inclusion of complex features such as linkage disequilibriu…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R35GM161641-01: Methods for quantifying selection and predicting evolutionary dynamics (2026)
- 5R35GM138233-06: Methods for quantifying selection in evolving populations (2024)
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