Postdoc
Email: sfoy@email.arizona.edu
Office/Lab: LSS329
In 2007, I graduated from Truman State University with a BA in Biology and then attended the University of Missouri in Kansas City for graduate school. Working in the bioinformatics lab of Gerald Wyckoff, I graduated with a PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry in 2013. While at UMKC, I specialized in protein structural bioinformatics–specifically, superimposing protein structures, deriving sequence alignments based on these superimposed structures, and generating a dendrogram utilizing protein structure instead of the conventional sequence. As a graduate student in the Wyckoff lab, I became familiar with numerous bioinformatic algorithms such as protein structural superpositioning and alignment, sequence alignments, and dendrogram generation. Furthermore, I developed fluency in the Perl programming language which includes advanced processes such as parallel processing, advanced interprocess communication (IPC), dynamic programming, and recursive subroutines.
As a postdoc in the evolutionary biology lab of Joanna Masel, we are currently attempting to determine what patterns are preferred over others for the generation of de novo genes. These patterns may include genetic peculiarities or they may involve the sequence and/or structure of the expressed protein. Otherwise stated, does selection prefer that de novo genes possess certain characteristics? Does it select against other characteristics? Although this project is exploratory in nature, we are initiating the project by measuring the aggregation propensity and intrinsic disorder of proteins over evolutionary time because selection undoubtedly influences these two characteristics.
Publications:
Foy SG, Wilson BA, Cordes MHJ, Masel J. Progressively more subtle aggregation avoidance strategies form a long-term arrow of protein evolutionary time, manuscript in preparation
Foy SG, Wilson BA, Neme R, Masel J. Young Genes are Highly Disordered, Falsifying the Continuum Hypothesis of De Novo Gene Birth, Nature Ecology & Evolution, in review
Andreatta, M.E., Levine, J.Al., Foy, S.G., Guzman, L., Kosinski, L., Cordes, M.H.J., Masel, J. (2015) The recent de novo origin of protein C-termini, Genome Biology & Evolution 7(6):1686-1701.