Comparative genomics

From Free net encyclopedia

(Difference between revisions)

Revision as of 08:51, 8 February 2006
Macha (Talk | contribs)
Added PhIGs link to thins pages (removes from Bioinformatics)
Next diff →

Current revision

Comparative genomics is the study of relationships between the genomes of different species or strains. Comparative genomics is an attempt to take advantage of the information provided by the signatures of selection to understand the function and evolutionary processes that act on genomes. While it is still a young field, it holds great promise to yield insights into many aspects of the evolution of modern species. The sheer amount of information contained in modern genomes (several gigabytes in the case of humans) necessitates that the methods of comparative genomics are mostly computational in nature. Gene finding is an important application of comparative genomics.

Identifying the mechanisms of eukaryotic genome evolution by comparative genomics is one of the important goals of the field. It is however often complicated by the multiplicity of events that have taken place throughout the history of individual lineages, leaving only distorted and superimposed traces in the genome of each living organism. For this reason comparative genomics studies of small model organisms (for example yeast) are of great importance to advance our understanding of general mechanisms of evolution.

Having come a long way from its initial use of finding genes, comparative genomics is now concentrating on finding regulatory regions. These are small stretches of DNA, not more than 15 bases long, which decide when a particular gene will produce its product. From 2001 onwards, a series of papers have been published by the genomics group at MIT which describe the use of comparative genomics in this area. They say that several such important regulatory regions are conserved across even distantly related genera.

[edit]

References

Filipski, A. and S. Kumar. 2005. Comparative genomics in eukaryotes. In The Evolution of the Genome (ed. T.R. Gregory), pp. 521-583. Elsevier, San Diego.

Gregory, T.R. and R. DeSalle. 2005. Comparative genomics in prokaryotes. In The Evolution of the Genome (ed. T.R. Gregory), pp. 585-675. Elsevier, San Diego.

Dujon B. et al. Genome evolution in yeasts. In Nature 430, pp. 35-44 (1 July 2004).

[edit]