Contributions by role
Contributions by subject area
Damien D Hinsinger
Summary
My main research interest is to understand how biodiversity we observe today has evolved. For example, is disjunct biogeography due to neutral (geological or climatic events) or to selective pressures (divergent selection)? What is the time-scale of diversification for a group of species, like a genus? Did climatic variation during the Cenozoic and quaternary glaciations influence species in a specific area more strongly than in other areas? Because these questions could be applied to both plants and animals, my groups of study are diverse, from fishes to trees species, and from parasites to endemic species. I use methods ranging from phylogenetics to population genetics, with several types of markers (AFLP, nuclear DNA, cpDNA, genetic data), combined with geological and other biological data to infer and date phylogeographic scenarios. Since my post-doctoral position at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.), I am more specifically interested in the analysis of NGS (Next-Generation Sequencing) data, as these provide very powerful tools to answer evolutionary questions,such as fine-scale speciation patterns or complex reticulate evolution. Analyzing the huge amount of data produced by NGS increases the need for bioinformatics, I developed skills in pipelining for analyses of mitogenomes, as well as nuclear SNP-related data.