My main current interest is in the consequences of erroneous gene expression, in terms of the physiological effects they cause in the cell (protein aggregation, etc.) but particularly in relation to the longer-term evolutionary implications. For example, when, how, and why do genes evolve to be less error-prone or to contain sequence features that allow quality control machinery to recognize an erroneous isoform? To what extent can genes be error-proofed despite having to specify all kinds of alternative information (e.g. for binding sites, translational speed, and of course amino acid content)? And is it always optimal to be an accurate sequence?

I have also been doing some work on gene duplicability as well as on the impact of nucleosome occupancy and splicing on coding sequence evolution so I'm trying to stay abreast of what's happening in those areas.

Publications

• Warnecke T & Hurst LD (2011) Error prevention and mitigation as forces in the evolution of genes and genomes. Nature Reviews Genetics 12:875-881
• Warnecke T & Rocha EPC (2011) Function-specific accelerations in rates of sequence evolution suggest predictable epistatic responses to reduced effective population size. Molecular Biology and Evolution 28(8):2339-2349
• Warnecke T, Huang Y, Przytycka TM, Hurst LD (2010) Unique cost dynamics elucidate the role of frame-shifting errors in promoting translational robustness. Genome Biology and Evolution 2:636-645
• Warnecke T & Hurst LD (2010) GroEL dependency affects codon usage - support for a critical role of misfolding in gene evolution. Molecular Systems Biology 6:340
• Warnecke T, Guang-Zhong W, Lercher MJ, Hurst LD (2009) Does negative auto-regulation increase gene duplicability? BMC Evolutionary Biology 9:193
• Warnecke T, Weber CC, Hurst LD (2009) Why there is more to protein evolution than protein function: splicing, nucleosomes and dual-coding sequence. Biochemical Society Transactions 37(4):756-761
• Warnecke T, Batada NN, Hurst LD (2008) The impact of the nucleosome code on coding sequence evolution in yeast. PLoS Genetics 4(11):e1000250.
• Warnecke T, Parmley JL, Hurst LD (2008) Finding exonic islands in a sea of non-coding sequence: splicing related constraints on protein composition and evolution are common in intron-rich genomes. Genome Biology 9:R29
• Warnecke T & Hurst LD (2007) Evidence for a Trade-Off between Translational Efficiency and Splicing Regulation in Determining Synonymous Codon Usage in Drosophila melanogaster. Molecular Biology and Evolution 24(12):2755–2762