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Focus & Philosophy (continued) |
Polymorphism
analysis:
By extensive human coding region sequence analysis and evolutionary
comparisons to outgroup primate species, an appropriate weighting
factor can be derived for nonsynonymous polymorphisms. The
goal is to use this weighting method to help determine the
likelihood that a specific mutation isolated by any of a variety
of methods as putatively disease causing is indeed causal
within a given population. In addition, the interface between
complex disease mapping and evolutionary genomics can provide
information which informs mapping experiments while mapping
experiments provide data for further evolutionary analysis.
This is a major part of the work taking place in the lab to
date.
Bioinformatics:
A major effort during my postdoctoral research was to obtain
the resources necessary to put together a relational database
of genomic sequences and associated information. This includes
expression information, divergence information, polymorphism
information, and disease linkage information. We envision
several types of publications coming directly from the techniques
and programs built to handle and query the data, but more
importantly, observations made using this tool will lead
to hypothesis testing experiments performed at the bench.
We in the lab actively seek collaborations with people who
work in a variety of systems, including in model organisms
such as mice, yeast, and Drosophila, where experimental
manipulation of genes and gene pathways will allow for the
testing of the effects of predictions made in silico.
--Dr. Wyckoff
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