About
I am an IGERT Graduate Research Fellow seeking a Ph.D. in the field of Bioinformatics at the University of Oregon. I am a member of the Computer Science Department cross-training in the Institute of Neuroscience, where I perfrom my day-to-day work in the Postlethwait Lab.
Researh Interests
Several times in the history of life whole-genome duplication events played a significant role in shaping organismal evolution. In addition to the two rounds of genome duplication that occurred near the time of the vertebrate radiation, an additional round of genome duplication occurred at the base of the radiation of teleost fish (the crown group of ray-fin fish, like zebrafish, and pufferfish, distinct from basally diverging ray-fin fish, like sturgeon and gar). This third whole-genome event generated duplicate chromosome segments in teleosts corresponding to single chromosome segments in humans and other mammals. For example, teleosts possess two copies of the human HOXA cluster (hoxaa and hoxab) surrounded by duplicate copies of many additional genes on the homeologous chromosomes.
This conservation of genomic structure provides information about organismal origin and change over time. My research interests include investigating this conservation through a high-volume, automated analysis of genomic data, applying fundamental Computer Science principles such as data mining, search, tree construction, and parallelism to the study of these evolutionary forces. My primary research project involves the identification and characterization of co-ortholog genes and their corresponding chromosome segments in zebrafish.
- If you are on the University of Oregon Campus Network (or VPN), you can view my current research work online.
Publications
- Catchen, Julian M., Conery, John S., and Postlethwait, John H. (2007) Inferring Ancestral Gene Order. Methods in Molecular Biology: Bioinformatics. Ed. Jonathan Keith, Humana Press, Totowa, NJ, USA. In press.
- Catchen, Julian M., Conery, John S., and Postlethwait, John H. Inferring Ancestral Chromosomes. Poster. NSF IGERT Minisymposium Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. October 7, 2006.
- Conery, J.S., Catchen, J.M., and Lynch, M. Rule-based workflow management for bioinformatics. VLDB Journal 14(3): 318-329, 2005.
Education
- B.S. in Computer Science from Pennsylvania State University, 2000
- M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon, 2006