Chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) are often used for the study of plant genetics and evolution. Plastid and mitochondrial genome sequences have allowed us to investigate plant evolution on a genetic level to infer molecular evolutionary rates, population-genetic processes, co-evolutionary phenomena, and numerous evolutionary questions and hypotheses. Ficus...
Plant-parasitic nematodes cause more than US $100 billion in annual agriculture loss worldwide. Thorough knowledge of their genetic diversity, and interactions with endosymbionts and environment have the potential to provide valuable insights into the basic biology of these animals, and assist future efforts aimed at management of these plant parasites....
Pseudomonas is a diverse, ubiquitous, and widely studied genus of bacteria. As Pseudomonas species occupy a wide range of niches in the ecosystem, they have made remarkable biological impacts. Better understanding of Pseudomonas biology, genetic diversity, and functional interactions with other organisms and the environment will provide valuable insights into...
Bacteria are abundant in marine environments. They play important roles in nutrient cycling and form symbiotic interactions with eukaryotes. However, the vast majority of bacterial taxa are difficult to maintain in laboratory cultures, meaning that most microbiological research of the past century has focused on a small subset of bacteria....
Mutualistic associations between corals and symbiotic microalgae of the genus Symbiodium power tropical reef ecosystems, hotspots of marine biodiversity that buffer coastlines, support tourism- and fisheries-based economies, and offer untapped potential for discovery of novel pharmaceutical compounds. However, reef ecosystems are declining at an alarming rate, in large part due...
Understanding the impact of mitochondrial dysfunction on genome evolution has the potential not only to provide new insights on the basic evolutionary processes influencing mitochondrial and nuclear genomes, but may also reveal novel avenues for evolutionary adaptive recovery from harmful mutations. Aberrant mitochondrial activity is fundamental to the pathology of...
Caenorhabditis elegans is arguably the best understood animal on the planet.
Used for over 50 years to study development, we have a vast amount of knowledge of
the inner workings of this worm. Our knowledge is incomplete, however, without
placing this organism in its evolutionary and ecological context. In this...
Motivation
Relatively little is known about the evolution of mitochondrial genomes between Caenorhabditis species despite decades of research. Both the worldwide search for new nematode species and the effort to increase sequencing speeds require automated tools to quickly characterize and categorize large amounts of data.
Results
We developed an automated...
As DNA sequencing technologies continue to advance, resulting in increased throughput and decreased costs, both the number of researchers utilizing these technologies and the quantity of data outputted by a single sequencing experiment will, likewise, continue to increase. Currently, DNA sequence data can be generated at a much faster rate...
As the world’s population continues to increase every year, a greater proportion of people are living in urban environments. This process of global urbanization has been previously shown to affect evolution of plants and animals by restricting gene flow, increasing genetic drift, and causing divergent selection between rural and urban...
Genetic counseling, a healthcare profession centered on communicating genetic information to patients and helping them understand it, has been rapidly evolving with the development of genetic sequencing and editing technology over the past decades. Consequently, future and current genetic counselors must address societal and ethical implications, as well as historical...
Symbiosis takes place across the domains of life. In the plant-parasitic nematode, Xiphinema americanum species complex, the bacterial endosymbiont, identified as Candidatus Xiphinematobacter americanum, lives in the gut epithelia of mature female nematodes and moves to the ovaries and uterus where it is transmitted to the eggs. This suggests that...
Though previous genetic research studies performed on Caenorhabditis elegans
found that high levels of endogenous oxidative stress resulted in decreased health, and
that mitochondrial DNA deletions accumulated with age in these organisms, no studies
have been conducted to link these two separate findings. This study correlated these
separate results by...
Although assays have been done on the effects of vitamin E alpha-tocopherol (ɑ-tocopherol) on the lifespan of wildtype C. elegans, none have been done on the effects of the vitamin on mutant strains with mitochondrial mutations. By using a mev-1 genetic mutant strain of C. elegans with higher levels of...