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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Beyond Building A Tree: Phylogeny Of Pitvipers And Exploration Of Evolutionary Patterns, Allyson Fenwick
Beyond Building A Tree: Phylogeny Of Pitvipers And Exploration Of Evolutionary Patterns, Allyson Fenwick
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
As generic and higher-scale evolutionary relationships are increasingly well understood, systematists move research in two directions: 1) understanding specieslevel relationships with dense taxon sampling, and 2) evaluating evolutionary patterns using phylogeny. In this study I address both foci of systematic research using pitvipers, subfamily Crotalinae. For direction one, I evaluate the relationships of 96% of pitvipers by combining independent sets of molecular and phenotypic data. I find the inclusion of species with low numbers of informative characters (i.e. less than 100) negatively impacts resolution of the phylogeny, and the addition of independent datasets has no effect on or a small …
Evolutionary Relationships Among Staphylococci And The Prevention Of Staphylococcus Aureus Nasal Colonization, Ryan Paul Lamers
Evolutionary Relationships Among Staphylococci And The Prevention Of Staphylococcus Aureus Nasal Colonization, Ryan Paul Lamers
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Staphylococcus is a significant cause of human infection and mortality, worldwide. Currently, there are greater than 60 taxa within Staphylococcus, and nearly all are pathogenic. The collective potential for virulence among species of Staphylococcus heightens the overall clinical significance of this genus and argues for a thorough understanding of the evolutionary relationships among species. Within Staphylococcus, aureus is the most common cause of human infection, where nasal carriage of this bacterium is a known risk factor for autoinfection. The predisposition to infection by nasal carriers of S. aureus, and the ease with which strains are transferred between individuals, suggests that …
Modeling And Partitioning The Nucleotide Evolutionary Process For Phylogenetic And Comparative Genomic Inference, Todd Castoe
Modeling And Partitioning The Nucleotide Evolutionary Process For Phylogenetic And Comparative Genomic Inference, Todd Castoe
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The transformation of genomic data into functionally relevant information about the composition of biological systems hinges critically on the field of computational genome biology, at the core of which lies comparative genomics. The aim of comparative genomics is to extract meaningful functional information from the differences and similarities observed across genomes of different organisms. We develop and test a novel framework for applying complex models of nucleotide evolution to solve phylogenetic and comparative genomic problems, and demonstrate that these techniques are crucial for accurate comparative evolutionary inferences. Additionally, we conduct an exploratory study using vertebrate mitochondrial genomes as a model …