Dr. Maria Beatriz Walter Costa
I am a Bioinformatician and focus on data analysis using Bioinformatics tools such as linux, python and bash. My main interest is to extract valuable information from biological data. For that I collaborate with specialists from different areas of biology.
Currently, I apply machine learning to connect bacterial genomes to their environments. I am using labelled data to build models. With this, I want to better understand how certain genomic features of bacteria allow them to survive in different environments.
The SSS-test, Selection on the Secondary Structure test, is a representative research of mine. This test was the first in the scientific community that could detect positive selection in ncRNA structures. I developed it to address an important demand in the field of RNA evolution. Previous research focused on structural conservation, which is used to find functional molecules. However, no tool existed to find positive selection within a conserved group. My tool calculates selection scores based on nucleotide mutations and indels that impact the structure. By applying this tool in ~15 000 long ncRNA orthologs of primates, I found a small set of ~110 human long ncRNAs that have signs of positive selection. This analysis helped colleagues of experimental fields to explore molecules that are important for species-specific traits.
