About CCGG

The CCGG is a research center in the Department of Biology at Temple University. CCGG's mission is to bring together scientists who work on genetic and evolutionary theory and who employ computational approaches. CCGG scientists study a wide range of topics and tend to share three common research interests: [1] evolutionary theory, [2] genetic and genomic data, and [3] research approaches involving considerable computer programming.

A modern evolutionary framework combines the theory of genetics (i.e., how inheritance from parent to offspring occurs), with the latest understanding of how genes shape development and life history, as well as how evolution happens when these genetic and developmental processes happen across many individuals over many generations.

When these theories are applied to the entire complement of genes in an organism or a species, we use the term, "genomics", rather than "genetics", but the core concepts remain the same. CCGG scientists use many sources of data, but increasingly a data set will include sequences from DNA genomes or proteomes or transcriptomes of multiple individuals. Such data have a fundamental digital aspect that lends them well to mathematical models and to computational analysis, thus, providing a powerful and integrated approach to understand all aspects of biology.