Biography:

Yaqoub Ashhab was born and grew up in Hebron, Palestine. He received his undergraduate biology degree with High Honors from the Middle East Technical University, Turkey in 1990. He received his M. S. and Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1994 and 1998, respectively. During his work in the laboratory of Prof. Ricardo Pujol-Borrell, he investigated the CC chemokines gene family. In his work he revealed the copy number polymorphisms in some of these genes, which was later proven to be interethnic copy number variations. In 1999 he joined the laboratory of Prof. Dina Ben-Yehuda in Hadassah Medical Centre, Hebrew University to do his Postdoctoral research in the filed of programmed cell death. During his postdoc, he discovered and characterized the BIRC7 gene that codes for a new member of the Inhibitor of Apoptosis Proteins family. From 2002-2004 he became a research associate in the same research centre. In 2004 he joined Palestine Polytechnic University in Hebron so as to lead the establishment of a biotechnology research unit that has been funded by the European Commission and the World Bank. He is currently an associate professor of molecular biology and director of Biotechnology Training and Research Unit. His main interests include Molecular evolution and its impact on host-pathogen interaction, microbial molecular diagnostics and vaccine development using bioinformatics approaches. He is the author and co-author of 18 scientific articles. He received several awards including the Golda Meer Award in 2002, Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1999 and the Turkish Minister of Higher Education Award in 1990.

Abstract:

Using Bioinformatics to Study Gene Duplications and its Impact on Molecular Evolution of Innate Immune System

Gene duplication has been considered as the leading mechanism for the evolution of new genes. A characteristic of eukaryotic genomes is that a large number of protein-coding genes belong to multigene families. With the availability of information about the entire genome of an increasing number of organisms, it has become possible to investigate and characterize various kinds of DNA sequence repeats including segmental genomic duplications. However little is known about the impact of genomic duplications on the evolution of human innate immune system. We have developed several bioinformatics approaches to study the phenomenon of recent segmental duplication and its association with the genes of innate immune system that are known to encode for pathogen recognizing receptors. Our results showed that, in contrast to the relatively low frequency of segmental duplications in housekeeping genes, the genes of innate immune system have a significantly higher rate of segmental duplication. Understanding the molecular basis behind the evolution of our immune system can provide deep insights into the mechanisms of host-pathogen evolution and the interethnic differences in the susceptibility and immune reactivity to infectious diseases.