Burak Yelmen defends his PhD thesis

Burak Yelmen will defend his doctoral thesis in Gene Technology entitled “Characterization of ancient Eurasian influences within modern human genomes” on August 24 at 10:15.

​Burak Yelmen has completed the curriculum of Doctoral Studies in Gene Technology and his thesis is available in DSpace.

The location of the event is Riia 23b/2 auditorium 105 and the event can also be followed online in Zoom.

Meeting ID: 919 1556 7207
Passcode: 479334

The supervisors of the thesis are Visiting Professor Luca Pagani (Institute of Genomics), Professor of Evolutionary Biology Mait Metspalu (Institute of Genomics) and Associate Professor of Population Genomics Toomas Kivisild (Institute of Genomics)

The opponent is Dr Mehmet Somel, Associate Professor in Human Evolutionary Genetics at the Middle East Technical University of Ankara, Turkey

Thesis summary:

Modern day human genomes are mixtures of ancient components. Thanks to advancements in ancient DNA (aDNA) research, we can detect the origins of these components and study them. However, aDNA might either not be available or be of low quality in many situations due to DNA structure being subject to degradation related to time and different environmental factors. Thankfully, we can identify and extract these ancient layers also from contemporary human genomes with local ancestry inference methods. With this approach, we can study admixed populations, which have highly divergent ancestral components, in terms of demography and functional analyses. This thesis particularly focuses on two such groups: South Asian populations, which are composed of West Eurasian and South Asian ancestries, and Ethiopian populations, which are composed of Eurasian and African ancestries. In the first part of my dissertation, past demographic events, diverse genomic variation and post-admixture natural selection in South Asia are investigated by generating surrogates for the two main ancestral components of contemporary South Asian genomes. In the second part, a local ancestry inference-based method is evaluated for improving selection detection in ancestral components of admixed genomes and it is applied on South Asian genomes. In the third and the last part, a similar approach to the first part is conducted for Ethiopian genomes to pinpoint the source of Eurasian ancestry in contemporary Ethiopians.