Genomics Commons^™

Application Of Rnai-Induced Gene Expression Profiles For Prognostic Prediction In Breast Cancer, Yue Wang, Kenneth . M. K. Mark, Matthew H. Ung, Arminja Kettenbach, Todd Miller, Wei Xu, Wenqing Cheng Cheng, Tian Xia, Chao Cheng

Dartmouth Scholarship

Homologous recombination (HR) is the primary pathway for repairing double-strand DNA breaks implicating in the development of cancer. RNAi-based knockdowns of BRCA1 and RAD51 in this pathway have been performed to investigate the resulting transcriptomic profiles. Here we propose a computational framework to utilize these profiles to calculate a score, named RNA-Interference derived Proliferation Score (RIPS), which reflects cell proliferation ability in individual breast tumors. RIPS is predictive of breast cancer classes, prognosis, genome instability, and neoadjuvant chemosensitivity. This framework directly translates the readout of knockdown experiments into potential clinical applications and generates a robust biomarker in breast cancer.

Two Complete Mitochondrial Genomes From Praticolella Mexicana Perez, 2011 (Polygyridae) And Gene Order Evolution In Helicoidea (Mollusca, Gastropoda), Russell L. Minton, Marco A. Martinez Cruz, Mark L. Farman, Kathryn E. Perez

Plant Pathology Faculty Publications

Helicoidea is a diverse group of land snails with a global distribution. While much is known regarding the relationships of helicoid taxa, comparatively little is known about the evolution of the mitochondrial genome in the superfamily. We sequenced two complete mitochondrial genomes from Praticolella mexicana Perez, 2011 representing the first such data from the helicoid family Polygyridae, and used them in an evolutionary analysis of mitogenomic gene order. We found the mitochondrial genome of P. mexicana to be 14,008 bp in size, possessing the typical 37 metazoan genes. Multiple alternate stop codons are used, as are incomplete stop codons. Mitogenome …

Comparing Performance Of Non-Tree-Based And Tree-Based Association Mapping Methods, Katherine L. Thompson, David W. Fardo

Statistics Faculty Publications

A central goal in the biomedical and biological sciences is to link variation in quantitative traits to locations along the genome (single nucleotide polymorphisms). Sequencing technology has rapidly advanced in recent decades, along with the statistical methodology to analyze genetic data. Two classes of association mapping methods exist: those that account for the evolutionary relatedness among individuals, and those that ignore the evolutionary relationships among individuals. While the former methods more fully use implicit information in the data, the latter methods are more flexible in the types of data they can handle. This study presents a comparison of the 2 …

General Equations For Natural Selection Under Complete Dominance, Kasthuri Kannan, Adriana Heguy

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Genome Sequences And Annotation Of Two Urinary Isolates Of E.Coli, Travis Kyle Price, Arya Mehtash, Laurynas Kalesinskas, Kema Malki, Evann Elizabeth Hilt, Catherine Putonti, Alan J. Wolfe

Bioinformatics Faculty Publications

The genus Escherichia includes pathogens and commensals. Bladder infections (cystitis) result most often from colonization of the bladder by uropathogenic E. coli strains. In contrast, a poorly defined condition called asymptomatic bacteriuria results from colonization of the bladder with E. coli strains without symptoms. As part of an on-going attempt to identify and characterize the newly discovered female urinary microbiota, we report the genome sequences and annotation of two urinary isolates of E. coli: one (E78) was isolated from a female patient who self-reported cystitis; the other (E75) was isolated from a female patient who reported that she did …

Promises And Challenges Of Eco-Physiological Genomics In The Field: Tests Of Drought Responses In Switchgrass. Plant Physiology, John T. Lovell, Eugene V. Shakirov, Scott Schwartz, David B. Lowry, Michael J. Aspinwall, Samuel H. Taylor, Jason Bonnette, Juan Diego Palacio-Mejia, Christine V. Hawkes, Philip A. Fay, Thomas E. Juenger

Biological Sciences Faculty Research

Identifying the physiological and genetic basis of stress tolerance in plants has proven to be critical to understanding adaptation in both agricultural and natural systems. However, many discoveries were initially made in the controlled conditions of greenhouses or laboratories, not in the field. To test the comparability of drought responses across field and greenhouse environments, we undertook three independent experiments using the switchgrass reference genotype Alamo AP13. We analyzed physiological and gene expression variation across four locations, two sampling times, and three years. Relatively similar physiological responses and expression coefficients of variation across experiments masked highly dissimilar gene expression responses …

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 …

Metabolic Profiling And Polymer Formation Of Gene Silenced Potato Periderms, Qing Cai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Suberin is a biopolyester constituent of specialized plant periderm tissues formed within the phellem cell walls. Suberin and waxes of the periderm layer act to prevent water diffusion, mechanical breakdown and pathogenic invasion in plants. Ferulic esters, ω-hydroxyacids and α,ω-fatty diacids are considered to be the most important linkage between aliphatic and aromatic suberin domains and also linked with cell-wall polysaccharides. The potato gene FHT (fatty ω- hydroxyacid/fatty alcohol hydroxycinnamoyl transferase) esterifies ferulic acid to suberin. Diminished levels of feruloyl transferase activity have been associated with lowered amounts of feruloyl esters of fatty acids in both suberin-associated waxes and suberin …

Exome Genotyping, Linkage Disequilibrium And Population Structure In Loblolly Pine (Pinus Taeda L.), Mengmeng Lu, Konstantin V. Krutovsky, Charles Dana Nelson, Tomasz E. Koralewski, Thomas D. Byram, Carol A. Loopstra

Forest Health Research and Education Center Faculty Publications

Background: Loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) is one of the most widely planted and commercially important forest tree species in the USA and worldwide, and is an object of intense genomic research. However, whole genome resequencing in loblolly pine is hampered by its large size and complexity and a lack of a good reference. As a valid and more feasible alternative, entire exome sequencing was hence employed to identify the gene-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and to genotype the sampled trees.

Results: The exons were captured in the ADEPT2 association mapping population of 375 clonally-propagated loblolly pine trees using …

An Expanded Evaluation Of Protein Function Prediction Methods Shows An Improvement In Accuracy, Yuxiang Jiang, Tal Ronnen Oron, Wyatt T. Clark, Asma R. Bankapur, Daniel D'Andrea, Rosalba Lepore, Christopher S. Funk, Indika Kahanda, Karin M. Verspoor, Asa Ben-Hur, Da Chen Emily Koo, Duncan Penfold-Brown, Dennis Shasha, Noah Youngs, Richard Bonneau, Alexandra Lin, Sayed M.E. Sahraeian, Pier Luigi Martelli, Giuseppe Profiti, Rita Casadio, Renzhi Cao, Zhaolong Zhong, Jianlin Cheng, Adrian Altenhoff, Nives Skunca, Christophe Dessimoz, Tunca Dogan, Kai Hakala, Suwisa Kaewphan, Farrokh Mehryar, Tapio Salakoski, Filip Ginter, Hai Fang, Ben Smithers, Matt Oates, Julian Gough, Petri Törönen, Patrik Koskinen, Liisa Holm, Ching-Tai Chen, Wen-Lian Hsu, Kevin Bryson, Domenico Cozzetto, Federico Minneci, David T. Jones, Samuel Chapan, Dukka Bkc, Ishita K. Khan, Daisuke Kihara, Dan Ofer, Nadav Rappoport, Amos Stern, Elenia Cibrian-Uhalte, Paul Denny, Rebecca E. Foulger, Reija Hieta, Duncan Legge, Ruth C. Lovering, Michele Magrane, Anna N. Melidoni, Prudence Mutowo-Meullenet, Klemens Pichler, Aleksandra Shypitsyna, Biao Li, Pooya Zakeri, Sarah Elshal, Léon-Charles Tranchevent, Sayoni Das, Natalie L. Dawson, David Lee, Jonathan G. Lees, Ian Stilltoe, Prajwal Bhat, Tamás Nepusz, Alfonso E. Romero, Rajkumar Sasidharan, Haixuan Yang, Alberto Paccanaro, Jesse Gillis, Adriana E. Sedeño-Cortés, Paul Pavlidis, Shou Feng, Juan M. Cejuela, Tatyana Goldberg, Tobias Hamp, Lothar Richter, Asaf Salamov, Toni Gabaldon, Marina Marcet-Houben, Fran Supek, Qingtian Gong, Wei Ning, Yuanpeng Zhou, Weidong Tian, Marco Falda, Paolo Fontana, Enrico Lavezzo, Stefano Toppo, Carlo Ferrari, Manuel Giollo, Damiano Piovesan, Silvio C.E. Tosatto, Angela Del Pozo, José M. Fernández, Paolo Maietta, Alfonso Valencia, Michael L. Tress, Alfredo Benso, Stefano Di Carlo, Gianfranco Politano, Alessandro Savino, Hafeez Ur Rehman, Matteo Re, Marco Mesiti, Giorgio Valentini, Joachim W. Bargsten, Aalt D.J. Van Dijk, Branislava Gemovic, Sanja Glisic, Vladmir Perovic, Veljko Veljkovic, Nevena Veljkovic, Danillo C. Almeida-E-Silva, Ricardo Z.N. Vencio, Malvika Sharan, Jörg Vogel, Lakesh Kansakar, Shanshan Zhang, Slobodan Vucetic, Zheng Wang, Michael J.E. Sternberg, Mark N. Wass, Rachael P. Huntley, Maria J. Martin, Claire O'Donovan, Peter N. Robinson, Yves Moreau, Anna Tramontano, Patricia C. Babbitt, Steven E. Brenner, Michal Linial, Christine A. Orengo, Burkhard Rost, Casey S. Greene, Sean D. Mooney, Iddo Friedberg, Predrag Radivojac

Faculty Publications

Background: A major bottleneck in our understanding of the molecular underpinnings of life is the assignment of function to proteins. While molecular experiments provide the most reliable annotation of proteins, their relatively low throughput and restricted purview have led to an increasing role for computational function prediction. However, assessing methods for protein function prediction and tracking progress in the field remain challenging.

Results: We conducted the second critical assessment of functional annotation (CAFA), a timed challenge to assess computational methods that automatically assign protein function. We evaluated 126 methods from 56 research groups for their ability to predict …

Characterization, Development And Multiplexing Of Microsatellite Markers In Three Commercially Exploited Reef Fish And Their Application For Stock Identification, Laura Taillebois, Christine Dudgeon, Safia Maher, David Crook, Thor Saunders, Diane P. Barton, Jonathan A. Taylor, David J. Welch, Stephen J. Newman, Michael J. Travers, Richard J. Saunders, Jennifer Ovenden

Fisheries Research Articles

Thirty-four microsatellite loci were isolated from three reef fish species; golden snapper Lutjanus johnii, blackspotted croaker Protonibea diacanthus and grass emperor Lethrinus laticaudis using a next generation sequencing approach. Both IonTorrent single reads and Illumina MiSeq paired-end reads were used, with the latter demonstrating a higher quality of reads than the IonTorrent. From the 1–1.5 million raw reads per species, we successfully obtained 10–13 polymorphic loci for each species, which satisfied stringent design criteria. We developed multiplex panels for the amplification of the golden snapper and the blackspotted croaker loci, as well as post-amplification pooling panels for the grass …

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 …

An Integrative And Applicable Phylogenetic Footprinting Framework For Cis-Regulatory Motifs Identification In Prokaryotic Genomes, Bingqiang Liu, Hanyuan Zhang, Chaun Zhou, Guojaun Li, Anne Fennell, Guanghui Wang, Yu Kang, Qi Liu

Agronomy, Horticulture and Plant Science Faculty Publications

Background: Phylogenetic footprinting is an important computational technique for identifying cis-regulatory motifs in orthologous regulatory regions from multiple genomes, as motifs tend to evolve slower than their surrounding non-functional sequences. Its application, however, has several difficulties for optimizing the selection of orthologous data and reducing the false positives in motif prediction. Results: Here we present an integrative phylogenetic footprinting framework for accurate motif predictions in prokaryotic genomes (MP3 ). The framework includes a new orthologous data preparation procedure, an additional promoter scoring and pruning method and an integration of six existing motif finding algorithms as basic motif search engines. Specifically, …

Development Of Genomic Resources For The Evaluation Of Red Snapper, An Emerging Species Candidate For Marine Aquaculture And Stock Enhancement, Adrienne Elise Norrell

Master's Theses

The northern red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) is a highly targeted reef fish candidate for marine aquaculture and stock enhancement in the southern United States. This work aimed to develop genomic resources for the genetic management of aquaculture programs and to investigate population structure using high-throughput sequencing technologies. Eighty-four new microsatellite markers were developed through screening of Illumina paired-end sequencing reads. Microsatellite loci and Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) generated through Restriction Site Associated DNA (RAD) sequencing were assayed in 5 outbred full-sib families to construct a high-density linkage map of the red snapper genome. The map consists of 7,964 …

Methods To Account For Breed Composition In A Bayesian Gwas Method Which Utilizes Haplotype Clusters, Danielle F. Wilson-Wells

Department of Statistics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In livestock, prediction of an animal’s genetic merit using genomic information is becoming increasingly common. The models used to make these predictions typically assume that we are sampling from a homogeneous population. However, in both commercial and experimental populations the sire and dam of an individual may be a mixture of different breeds. Haplotype models can capture this population structure.

Two models based on breed specific haplotype clusters where developed to account for differences across multiple breeds. The first model utilizes the breed composition of the individual, while the second utilizes the breed composition from the sire and dam. Haplotype …

Development Of An In Silico Kir Genotyping Algorithm And Its Application To Population And Cancer Immunogenetic Analyses, Howard Rosoff

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Gene content determination and variant calling in the complex KIR genomic region are useful for immune system function analysis, pathogenesis and disease risk factor elucidation, immunotherapy development, evolutionary investigations, and human migration modeling. Sequence-specific oligonucleotide and sequence-specific primer PCR methods are the de facto standards for KIR presence/absence identification, but the current platforms are unsuitable for SNP calling, impractical for KIR typing large cohorts of DNA samples, and inapplicable for typing repositories in which sequence data, but not cells or cell analytes, are available. Alternative typing methods, such as in silico sequence-based typing, can address the problems associated with amplicon-based …

A Comparative Study Of K-Spectrum-Based Error Correction Methods For Next-Generation Sequencing Data Analysis, Isaac Akogwu, Nan Wang, Chaoyang Zhang, Ping Gong

Faculty Publications

Background: Innumerable opportunities for new genomic research have been stimulated by advancement in high-throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS). However, the pitfall of NGS data abundance is the complication of distinction between true biological variants and sequence error alterations during downstream analysis. Many error correction methods have been developed to correct erroneous NGS reads before further analysis, but independent evaluation of the impact of such dataset features as read length, genome size, and coverage depth on their performance is lacking. This comparative study aims to investigate the strength and weakness as well as limitations of some newest k-spectrum-based methods and …

Comparative Genomics, Transcriptomics, And Physiology Distinguish Symbiotic From Free-Living Chlorella Strains, Cristian F. Quispe, Olivia Sonderman, Maya Khasin, Wayne R. Riekhof, James L. Van Etten, Kenneth Nickerson

Kenneth Nickerson Papers

Most animal–microbe symbiotic interactions must be advantageous to the host and provide nutritional benefits to the endosymbiont. When the host provides nutrients, it can gain the capacity to control the interaction, promote self-growth, and increase its fitness. Chlorella-like green algae engage in symbiotic relationships with certain protozoans, a partnership that significantly impacts the physiology of both organisms. Consequently, it is often challenging to grow axenic Chlorella cultures after isolation from the host because they are nutrient fastidious and often susceptible to virus infection. We hypothesize that the establishment of a symbiotic relationship resulted in natural selection for nutritional and metabolic …

Distribution Of Genomic Variation In The Usda Soybean Germplasm Collection And Relationship With Phenotypic Variation, Nonoy Batiller Bandillo

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The USDA Soybean Germplasm Collection harbors a large stock of genetic diversity with potential to accelerate soybean cultivar development. The extent and nature of favorable alleles contained in the collection are not well known nor is the distribution of genetic variation and how it relates to phenotypic variation. The genotyping of the entire USDA Soybean Germplasm Collection marked the beginning of a systematic exploration of genetic diversity for genetic research and breeding. In this research, we conducted the first comprehensive analysis of population structure on the collection of ~14,400 soybean accessions [Glycine max (L.) Merr. and G. soja Siebold …

Effects Of Mutating The Mrub_1345 Gene Found In Meiothermus Ruber, Brandon M. Wills, Lori R. Scott

Celebration of Learning

Meiothermus ruber is a unique, red-pigmented, thermophilic bacterium that preferentially grows in high-temperature environments ranging from 35-70°C. Due to the lack of studies performed on this organism, there is quite a bit of information missing in regard to the genes found within this organism’s genome and their function. This study focuses in on the Mrub_1345 gene in M. ruber, which has been suggested to be orthologous to the proC gene found of E. coli proline biosynthesis pathway. To test if these genes are orthologs, we performed the complementation assay on wild-type proC. Next, we performed site-directed mutagenesis on amino acids …