Bianca De Sanctis

The paper introduces ratePlacer, a method for dating ancient environmental DNA by accounting for DNA damage, showing it outperforms existing methods but highlights challenges in age estimation.

This study identifies the oldest known plague strains in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5500 years ago, showing early outbreaks were lethal and challenged the idea that agriculture was necessary for plague epidemics.

Panmap efficiently aligns, genotypes, and places reads on large pangenomes using phylogenetic compression, enabling rapid analysis of up to 8 million genomes.

The paper uses ancient metagenomics to characterize subglacial microbiomes, showing they split into two clusters based on oxygen availability and redox conditions.

This paper develops an automated workflow to place ancient DNA sequences into reference phylogenies, using a parsimony and likelihood-based approach, and applies it to Y-chromosomal data.

The paper shows that the neutral molecular clock rate depends on population size and mutation rate, contradicting classical theory under strong mutation pressures.