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A Systems Biology Approach For Predicting Essential Genes And Deciphering Their Dynamics Under Stress In Streptococcus Sanguinis, Fadi El-Rami

Theses and Dissertations

Infectious diseases are the top leading cause of death worldwide. Identifying essential genes, genes indispensable for survival, has been proven indispensable in defining new therapeutic targets against pathogens, major elements of the minimal set genome to be harnessed in synthetic biology, and determinants of evolutionary relationships of phylogenetically distant species. Thus, essentiality studies promise valuable revenues that can decipher much of biological complexities.

Taking advantage of the available microbial sequences and the essentiality studies conducted in various microbial models, we proposed a framework for the prediction of essential genes based on our experimentally verified knowledge of the pathways involved in …

Examining The Evolutionary Constraints Of Gene Expression Levels In S. Cerevisiae, Andrea Janelle Jackson

Theses and Dissertations

It has been widely reported that some genes are expressed at a higher level than others. However, it has not been shown whether each gene is expressed consistently between studies and at the same level compared to all other genes. Here, we examined six RNA-seq datasets and found that the mRNA level of each gene is indeed consistent relative to all other genes. This result implies that there are evolutionary pressures that drive genes to maintain either low or high expression. In order to identify these pressures, we compared gene expression level to the features of each gene (or associated …