Western Bioinformatics Research Seminar Series

Presentation Title

The Code of Survival: Machine Learning Deciphers How Life Thrives in Extreme Conditions

Speaker

Gurjit Randhawa
School of Computer Science, University of Guelph

Learning objectives:

  • Understand how extreme environments (temperature, pH, radiation) shape genome-wide compositional patterns in microbes.
  • Learn how alignment-free, k-mer–based machine learning detects genomic signatures beyond traditional sequence alignment.
  • Explore evidence of cross-domain genomic convergence between bacteria and archaea driven by shared environmental pressures.
  • Discover how interpretable AI reveals codon usage biases and adaptive signals underlying survival in extreme conditions.