Alexander Bolshoy

Alexander Bolshoy
Professor, Dept. of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology
University of Haifa, Israel

Biography

Dr. Bolshoy is an Associated Professor in the Department of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology, and a member of the Institute of Evolution at the University of Haifa, Israel. He completed his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Computational Structural Biology in 1993. Dr. Bolshoy has been a major player in the field of DNA Linguistics and in the field of DNA curvature and bendability since the 1990-ies. He is the author of the books and many scientific articles.

Research Interest

Bioinformatics Expertise: DNA structure, multiple sequence alignment algorithms, sequence repetitiveness, sequence complexity, pattern recognition, non-linear regression, heuristic methods of optimization.
During the last years my work tries to shed light on one of the big questions in comparative genomics: what are the factors affecting gene length, and whether variations in gene length are dependent on organismal evolution. Currently we know that some genes become longer than their predecessors while other genes become shorter; however, whether the sizes of these factions vary randomly in each organism or follow certain tendency remains an open question.