Overview

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We invite you to the workshop: Epistasis: Genotype to Phenotype to be held at Temple University in Philadelphia (April 7, 2021).

The complex relation between an organism’s genes and its observable characteristics is conceptualized as genotype-phenotype map, a probabilistic model associating sequence features to organism’s traits. Mechanistic characterization of this map remains sparse, despite the exponential growth of genomic datasets. An extremely promising strategy to chart genotype-phenotype maps and thus discover the most basic rules of life is building models that explain the resilience of molecular function, or epistasis, in the face of the continued accumulation of genetic variation.

This meeting is the first half of a two-part workshop bringing together researchers from the fields of statistical physics, machine learning, evolutionary biology and genomics, to discuss opportunities and developments related to one of NSF’s 10 Big Ideas: Elucidating the sets of rules that predict an organism's phenotype. Emphasis is on the evolutionary role of epistasis and the theoretical approaches used to investigate it, including protein covariation analysis, machine learning and phylogenetic inference.

The meeting will feature a set of invited speakers presentations in the morning followed by lightning presentations from graduate students and early researchers.