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Full-Text Articles in Computational Biology

Comparative Population Genomics And Speciation Of Snakes Across The North American Deserts, Edward A. Myers Sep 2016

Comparative Population Genomics And Speciation Of Snakes Across The North American Deserts, Edward A. Myers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Understanding the process of speciation is of central interest to evolutionary biologists. Speciation can be studied using a phylogeographic approach, by identifying regions that promote lineage divergence, addressing whether speciation has occurred with gene flow, and when extended to multiple taxa, addressing if the same patterns of speciation are shared across codistributed groups with different ecologies. Here I examine the comparative phylogeographic histories and population genomics of thirteen snake taxa that are widely distributed and co-occur across the arid southwest of North America. I first quantify the degree to which these species groups have a shared history of population divergence …


Optimization Of A Genomic Editing System Using Crispr/Cas9-Induced Site-Specific Gene Integration, Jillian L. Mccool Ms., Nick Hum, Gabriela G. Loots Aug 2016

Optimization Of A Genomic Editing System Using Crispr/Cas9-Induced Site-Specific Gene Integration, Jillian L. Mccool Ms., Nick Hum, Gabriela G. Loots

STAR Program Research Presentations

The CRISPR-Cas system is an adaptive immune system found in bacteria which helps protect against the invasion of other microorganisms. This system induces double stranded breaks at precise genomic loci (1) in which repairs are initiated and insertions of a target are completed in the process. This mechanism can be used in eukaryotic cells in combination with sgRNAs (1) as a tool for genome editing. By using this CRISPR-Cas system, in addition to the “safe harbor locus,” ROSAβ26, the incorporation of a target gene into a site that is not susceptible to gene silencing effects can be achieved through few …


Functional Car Models For Spatially Correlated Functional Datasets, Lin Zhang, Veerabhadran Baladandayuthapani, Hongxiao Zhu, Keith A. Baggerly, Tadeusz Majewski, Bogdan Czerniak, Jeffrey S. Morris Jan 2016

Functional Car Models For Spatially Correlated Functional Datasets, Lin Zhang, Veerabhadran Baladandayuthapani, Hongxiao Zhu, Keith A. Baggerly, Tadeusz Majewski, Bogdan Czerniak, Jeffrey S. Morris

Jeffrey S. Morris

We develop a functional conditional autoregressive (CAR) model for spatially correlated data for which functions are collected on areal units of a lattice. Our model performs functional response regression while accounting for spatial correlations with potentially nonseparable and nonstationary covariance structure, in both the space and functional domains. We show theoretically that our construction leads to a CAR model at each functional location, with spatial covariance parameters varying and borrowing strength across the functional domain. Using basis transformation strategies, the nonseparable spatial-functional model is computationally scalable to enormous functional datasets, generalizable to different basis functions, and can be used on …