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Investigating The Male-Driven Evolution Hypothesis Using Human AluRepeat Elements, Sridhar Ramachandran

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Thousands of copies of short interspersed repeats (SINEs) are scattered essentially ran-domly through the human genome. Although copies of each repeat subfamily are identical at the time of their insertion, they become subject to individual substitutions after insertion. As the relative time of insertion is known for many of these repeats, such "junk DNA" can be used to provide a sizeable number of time-series data points for studying substitution effects in a variety of genomic contexts. This dissertation specifically discusses the usefulness of the Alufamily of SINE repeats towards addressing open problems in genomics, population genetics, and biology in …