Guillaume Filion

Campus

UTSC

CSB Appointment

Full

Research Areas

Bioinformatics / Computational Biology, Genetics / Genomics

Education

Ph.D University Paris 7 Denis Diderot 2007
MSc Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon 2002

Primary Undergraduate Department

Biological Sciences

Research Description

In traditional folk tales, fairies bend over the cradles of the newborns to curse them or bless them. In modern science, fairies have been replaced by genes: they are the ultimate resource of an organism to make it through life. In order to keep the organism alive, gene networks must face three challenges: (1) to remain stable as the environment changes, (2) to change state as the environment remains constant, and (3) to overcome hijacking threats from viruses.

Our laboratory studies how genomes store and release information to meet those challenges. Our approach typically borrows from the fields of complex systems and from “big data”. We design genome-wide technologies to acquire data, and use machine learning methods to make sense of them.

Our present focus is on adversarial regulations between hosts and viruses. We use HIV as a model virus to understand how cells mount a response to shut down the expression of the virus. In parallel, we study how the virus escapes detection and hijacks the expression program of the cell to complete its own replication cycle. This work sheds light on how genomes protect themselves against viral infections and other genetic aggressors.