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University of Connecticut

Honors Scholar Theses

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Evolution

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Sequencing And Analysis Of Centromere Protein B In Wallaby And The Rapid Evolution Of The Centromere, Alexander Tedeschi May 2018

Sequencing And Analysis Of Centromere Protein B In Wallaby And The Rapid Evolution Of The Centromere, Alexander Tedeschi

Honors Scholar Theses

Using a combination of Sanger sequencing and RNA-seq data, this project aims to determine the nucleotide and amino acid sequence of Centromere Protein B (CENP-B), an important protein involved in the assembly of the kinetochore protein complex at the centromere, in several species of marsupials, specifically wallabies. Despite their recent evolutionary history, these species have been shown to have surprisingly divergent centromeric DNA sequences. Through comparative analysis of these sequences, this project, along with analysis of several other CENPs, aims to determine if this divergence extends to the proteins closely associated with these sequences and possibly even further into the …


An Exploration Of The Phylogenetic Placement Of Recently Discovered Ultrasmall Archaeal Lineages, Jeffrey M. O'Brien Aug 2015

An Exploration Of The Phylogenetic Placement Of Recently Discovered Ultrasmall Archaeal Lineages, Jeffrey M. O'Brien

Honors Scholar Theses

In recent years, several new clades within the domain Achaea have been discovered. This is due in part to microbiological sampling of novel environments, and the increasing ability to detect and sequence uncultivable organisms through metagenomic analysis. These organisms share certain features, such as small cell size and streamlined genomes. Reduction in genome size can present difficulties to phylogenetic reconstruction programs. Since there is less genetic data to work with, these organisms often have missing genes in concatenated multiple sequence alignments. Evolutionary Biologists have not reached a consensus on the placement of these lineages in the archaeal evolutionary tree. There …


An Examination Of The Phylogenetic Diversity Of Green Algae (Chlorophyceae) That Symbiose With Spotted Salamanders (Ambystoma Maculatum) In The Egg Stage., Crystal Xue May 2014

An Examination Of The Phylogenetic Diversity Of Green Algae (Chlorophyceae) That Symbiose With Spotted Salamanders (Ambystoma Maculatum) In The Egg Stage., Crystal Xue

Honors Scholar Theses

In 1909, the species Oophila amblystomatis Lambert ex Wille was described for green algae that symbiose with salamanders in the egg stage (Wille). There are two hypotheses about the source of algae: 1) that algae enter from the surrounding water once the egg clutch is laid in a pond, and 2) that they are acquired from the maternal reproductive tract. We developed a third hypothesis developed to account for the salamander reproductive cycle. Male salamanders lay spermatophores, which are protein-filled capsules, on plant matter in and around ponds. Spermatophores are exposed to the environment before use by females in internal …


Numerical Assessment Of Sequence Conservation In Flu-Virus Hemagglutinin, Scott S. Norton May 2014

Numerical Assessment Of Sequence Conservation In Flu-Virus Hemagglutinin, Scott S. Norton

Honors Scholar Theses

The flu virus was investigated to find a common recognition domain to which an antibody against human-infected viruses can bind. If such a target site is structurally and electrostaticly conserved or invariant, only a single antibody would be required to attack the virus in all cases. The sequence of one of the viral surface proteins contains 24 amino acids that do not vary through mutation. However, these amino acids are neither contiguous in sequence or in space, and the ones that are associated with each other are not readily accessible to an antibody. They do provide a first impression of …