Gene families in Arabidopsis thaliana differ dramatically in copy number, organization within the genome, evolutionary rates, and rates of birth and death. The data at this web site is my effort to describe some of these parameters, and to help answer some larger questions. How does gene organization within the genome affect gene family evolution? Do different gene families differ in the mechanisms that drive their evolution? How do large-scale segmental duplications or episodes of polyploidy affect the evolution of different gene families?
In my thesis project, "New Tools for Understanding Plant Gene Family Evolution," I am writing software to help facilitate large gene family analysis, and to characterize differing mechanisms of gene duplication in a set of gene families. The software will integrate gene family evolutionary trees (phylogenies) and gene position within plant genomes. I will use the software to determine the relative importance of local and gene duplications and duplications resulting from polyploidy or other large-scale segmental duplications, in the Arabidopsis thaliana genome. I will also include genes from three other dicot species (Glycine max, Medicago truncatula, and Lycopersicon esculentum, and will use times-to-speciation in each gene family to help characterize evolutionary rates, and evolutionary distances between orthologs.
What's next? -Meta-analysis; follow up on several evolutionarily interesting families; make software available; make all trees viewable in ATV; add search feature; add nucleotide alignments and Ka/Ks comparisons; more global and close analysis.
Return to the main Plant Gene Family Evolution page.