IGERT Home Training Group Thematic Basis Fellowships NSF IGERT National Recruitment Program NSF IGERT Funding Research Areas: Bioinformatics Genome Evolution Genomics Macromolecular Structure & Function		Genome Evolution Overview Project Director Co-PI Jonathan Wendel Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology The availability of complete genome sequencesfrom diverse organisms offers unprecedented opportunities tounderstand patterns and processes of evolutionary change. CMB facultyare addressing a variety of problems in genome evolution. Severalfaculty members have an interest in sequence duplication and itsconsequences for the evolution of new function, as applied to: 1)locus-specific duplications, such as those that have occurred at themammalian major histocompatibility loci, the immunoglobulin genes andthe disease resistance genes of plants; and 2) genome-wideduplications that have occurred through a variety of mechanisms,including polyploidy. Eukaryotic genomes are also characterized by anabundance of mobile genetic elements. CMB faculty are interested inthe coevolution between host and "parasite" and the consequences oftransposition in shaping the eukaryotic genome. Underlying many of the proposed investigations are analyses ofrelated, duplicate or repetitive sequences. This presents challengesboth in phylogenetic reconstruction (determining orthologous andparalogous relationships) and in elucidating the acquisition of newfunction. Several members of the research group are refiningalgorithms for phylogenetic analyses and determining the types ofmolecular data most informative for phylogenetic reconstruction.Comparative analyses of related gene sequences, particularly thosefor which structural information is available, are also being used toinfer aspects of the relationship between evolutionary change andfunctional constraint. These approaches are already offeringimportant new insights into protein and RNA function.
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