Frantz Depaulis, a CNRS scientist at the Institut de Biologie de l'ENS (Paris) and a Visiting Scholar at iGLOBES, focuses on estimating the evolutionary rates of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and their possible variation in time, lineage or strain and along the genome. Such variation may signal the effect of natural selection acting on the viral population.

The research uses time series of viral sequence data from the GISAID database, and scrutinizes genomic variation to detect possible genetic exchanges between viral strains as well as the signature of selection. Such analyses are critically important since natural selection may target molecular variation associated with virulence evolution, resistance to the human immune system or to possible drugs if (and when) available.