Laurent Guéguen

Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor, Laboratory of Biometry and Evolutionary Biology, Université Claude
Bernard - Lyon 1

Laurent Guéguen is a computer scientist and since 2000 Associate Professor at the Laboratoire
de Biométrie et Biologie Évolutive at Université Claude Bernard - Lyon 1.

Since 2008, he has been working on phylogeny and molecular evolution, mostly in the development
of models and methods. He is one of the main developers of the Bio++ libraries. His recent modeling
research has focused on several levels of molecular evolution, such as codon usage (Pouyet et al.,
2016, “SENCA: A Multilayered Codon Model to Study the Origins and Dynamics of Codon Usage”,
GBE/Genome Biology and Evolution), genomic convergence (Rey et al., 2018,“Accurate Detection
of Convergent Amino-acid Evolution with PCOC”, MBE/Molecular Biology and Evolution), and
genome architecture (Semeria et al., 2015, Probabilistic Modeling of the Evolution of Gene Synteny
within Reconciled Phylogenies”, BMC/Bioinformatics).

Guéguen is also interested in developing methods to dig out clues about the evolutionary process from
the comparison of genomes at the level of genome organization (Biller et al., 2016, “Breaking Good:
Accounting for Fragility of Genomic Regions in Rearrangement Distance Estimation”, GBE/Genome
Biology and Evolution), and at the level of genes (Guéguen & Duret, 2018, “Unbiased Estimate of
Synonymous and Non-synonymous Substitution Rates with Non-stationary Base Composition”, MBE/
Molecular Biology and Evolution).

At SCAS, Guéguen, in collaboration with Carina Mugal and Hans Ellegren from the Department of Ecology
and Genetics/Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University, will model polymorphism and selection in phylogeny,
and develop this theoretical work in software easily usable by biologists. This project addresses the largest
problem in building a bridge between phylogeny and population genetics, a goal that is of increasing interest
among biologists.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2019-20.