300308 VO Human Evolutionary Genetics: genomic, genes, diseases (2018S)

The aim of this lecture is to provide students with knowledge and understanding of the scientific fields of human genetics, genomics and evolutionary genetics. This lecture will prepare students to understand how genetics, genomics and evolutionary genetics can be utilised to elucidate human phenotypic traits such as human diseases, host defence and behaviours.
The first part of this lecture introduces students to the structure of the human genome, the key aspects of human chromosome biology, human autosomal, mtDNA and X/Y-linked inheritance, gene functions and gene regulation and epigenetics. In the second part students will be briefly introduced to the state-of-the-art methods used in genomics and genetics. The third part of this lecture aims to provide an understanding of the concepts of human evolutionary genetics, population genetics, and anthropological genetics. Students will gain insights how various evolutionary processes (e.g., natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift, mutation, recombination, and migration) influence human genomic diversity. In the fourth part students will gain knowledge that is required to understand how genomic variation can contribute to phenotypic variation. In this part, there will be an emphasis on immunogenetics and human diseases and on neurogenetics and human behaviours (research-focused lectures providing case-studies). Student will gain understanding how genomic variation can directly or indirectly affect the risk to develop diseases, contribute to host defence, and influences human behaviours.

Teaching and learning methods: Lectures, handouts, and presentations (PowerPoint slides will be provided on Moodle).