Clark Lab
Principal Investigator: Nathaniel L Clark
Institution: University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA)
Primary Subfield: Genetics/Genomics
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary Linking genotype to phenotype is a unifying goal of genetics and is an important strategy for determining how biological systems operate in health and disease. This project develops new computational tools in the context of this FOA in computational genomics to link changes in genes and regulatory regions to the evolution of specific organismal phenotypes. It then applies those tools to multiple biological traits in mammals, birds, and fungi. The tools are present in our widely used comparative genomics package, RERconverge. RERconverge uses the power of convergent evolution, in which different species have repeatedly evolved the same phenotype or trait, to provide statistical repetition to locate genomic regions whose evolutionary rates responded to a particular convergent phenotype. The first goal of this project builds upon the RERconverge toolkit to analyze non-coding, potentially regulatory, regions of the genome. Regulatory regions evolve in a modular way that could be better analyzed with methods that operate at the scale of specific functional elements, such as transcription factor binding sites, and other methods that do not require aligned nucleotides betw…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01HG009299-09: Title: Functional Annotation of Genomes via Phenotypic Convergence within Large Multi-species Alignments (2026)
- 5R01HG009299-08: Title: Functional Annotation of Genomes via Phenotypic Convergence within Large Multi-species Alignments (2025)
- 5R01HG009299-07: Title: Functional Annotation of Genomes via Phenotypic Convergence within Large Multi-species Alignments (2024)
- 5R01EY030546-05: Discovery and characterization of ocular regulatory elements through evolutionary analysis (2024)
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