Matching Items (2)
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Description
Valley Fever, also known as coccidioidomycosis, is a respiratory disease that affects 10,000 people annually, primarily in Arizona and California. Due to a lack of gene annotation, diagnosis and treatment of Valley Fever is severely limited. In turn, gene annotation efforts are also hampered by incomplete genome sequencing. We intend

Valley Fever, also known as coccidioidomycosis, is a respiratory disease that affects 10,000 people annually, primarily in Arizona and California. Due to a lack of gene annotation, diagnosis and treatment of Valley Fever is severely limited. In turn, gene annotation efforts are also hampered by incomplete genome sequencing. We intend to use proteogenomic analysis to reannotate the Coccidioides posadasii str. Silveira genome from protein-level data. Protein samples extracted from both phases of Silveira were fragmented into peptides, sequenced, and compared against databases of known and predicted proteins sequences, as well as a de novo six-frame translation of the genome. 288 unique peptides were located that did not match a known Silveira annotation, and of those 169 were associated with another Coccidioides strain. Additionally, 17 peptides were found at the boundary of, or outside of, the current gene annotation comprising four distinct clusters. For one of these clusters, we were able to calculate a lower bound and an estimate for the size of the gap between two Silveira contigs using the Coccidioides immitis RS transcript associated with that cluster's peptides \u2014 these predictions were consistent with the current annotation's scaffold structure. Three peptides were associated with an actively translated transposon, and a putative active site was located within an intact LTR retrotransposon. We note that gene annotation is necessarily hindered by the quality and level of detail in prior genome sequencing efforts, and recommend that future studies involving reannotation include additional sequencing as well as gene annotation via proteogenomics or other methods.
ContributorsSherrard, Andrew (Author) / Lake, Douglas (Thesis director) / Grys, Thomas (Committee member) / Mitchell, Natalie (Committee member) / Computing and Informatics Program (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
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Description
In species with highly heteromorphic sex chromosomes, the degradation of one of the sex chromosomes can result in unequal gene expression between the sexes (e.g., between XX females and XY males) and between the sex chromosomes and the autosomes. Dosage compensation is a process whereby genes on the sex chromosomes

In species with highly heteromorphic sex chromosomes, the degradation of one of the sex chromosomes can result in unequal gene expression between the sexes (e.g., between XX females and XY males) and between the sex chromosomes and the autosomes. Dosage compensation is a process whereby genes on the sex chromosomes achieve equal gene expression which prevents deleterious side effects from having too much or too little expression of genes on sex chromsomes. The green anole is part of a group of species that recently underwent an adaptive radiation. The green anole has XX/XY sex determination, but the content of the X chromosome and its evolution have not been described. Given its status as a model species, better understanding the green anole genome could reveal insights into other species. Genomic analyses are crucial for a comprehensive picture of sex chromosome differentiation and dosage compensation, in addition to understanding speciation.

In order to address this, multiple comparative genomics and bioinformatics analyses were conducted to elucidate patterns of evolution in the green anole and across multiple anole species. Comparative genomics analyses were used to infer additional X-linked loci in the green anole, RNAseq data from male and female samples were anayzed to quantify patterns of sex-biased gene expression across the genome, and the extent of dosage compensation on the anole X chromosome was characterized, providing evidence that the sex chromosomes in the green anole are dosage compensated.

In addition, X-linked genes have a lower ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous substitution rates than the autosomes when compared to other Anolis species, and pairwise rates of evolution in genes across the anole genome were analyzed. To conduct this analysis a new pipeline was created for filtering alignments and performing batch calculations for whole genome coding sequences. This pipeline has been made publicly available.
ContributorsRupp, Shawn Michael (Author) / Wilson Sayres, Melissa A (Thesis advisor) / Kusumi, Kenro (Committee member) / DeNardo, Dale (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016