Directed Research Project Details
Automated Methods to Find Zebrafish Co-Orthologs of Human Genes
| Author: | Julian Catchen |
|---|---|
| Date: | August 20, 2004 |
| Time: | 11:00 |
| Location: | 220 Deschutes |
| Committee: | John Conery (Chair) John Postlethwait Biology Tom Titus Biology Michal Young |
Abstract
Thirty-five years ago Sasumu Ohno presented the theory of genome duplication. It states that it would have been impossible for bacteria to evolve into complex multi-cellular organisms, such as humans, without additional genetic material with which to compose the complex structures of vertebrates. Since that time, advances in the study of genomics has presented a large amount of evidence for two complete duplications of the genome of humans. In addition, a third duplication event is hypothesized to have occurred in the lineage of zebrafish. These duplications, if true, imply that for each human gene, there should be two corresponding zebrafish genes (co-orthologs). We seek to develop automated methods to search for these duplicate genes by examining the genomic data of humans and zebrafish. While previous attempts have involved examining small numbers of genes by hand or have used ad hoc collections of scripts, we seek to develop large scale tools and algorithms to find the co-orthologs. In this talk we will look at three such algorithms that we have developed and examine the resulting data they produced.