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Comparison Of The Compositional Proclivities Of The Complete Genomes Of Plasmodium Falciparum And Human, April Williams, Yuriy Fofanov, Catherine Putonti

Catherine Putonti

Pathogens and hosts have a dynamic relationship, one that is ever changing at the molecular level - the pathogen influencing the evolutionary path of the host and the host influencing the evolutionary path of the pathogen. The pathogen’s adaptation to a particular host could serve several purposes, e.g. to mimic the host to avoid detection, to take advantage of the host’s cellular machinery, to increase virulence, etc. Recognizing these adaptations is far from trivial, particularly when the size of the pathogen’s and host’s genomes differ by orders of magnitudes. Novel algorithms and data structures have been developed in our laboratory …