Everything about Comparative Genomics totally explained
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's 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 (750
megabytes in the case of humans) necessitates that the methods of comparative genomics are automated.
Gene finding is an important application of comparative genomics, as is discovery of new, non-coding functional elements of the genome.
Comparative genomics exploits both similarities and differences in the
proteins,
RNA, and
regulatory regions of different organisms to infer how
selection has acted upon these elements. Those elements that are responsible for similarities between different
species should be conserved through time (
stabilizing selection), while those elements responsible for differences among species should be divergent (
positive selection). Finally, those elements that are unimportant to the evolutionary success of the organism will be unconserved (selection is neutral).
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 functional proteins, comparative genomics is now concentrating on finding
regulatory regions and
siRNA molecules. Recently, it has been discovered that distantly related species often share long conserved stretches of
DNA that don't appear to code for any protein. It is unknown at this time what function such
ultra-conserved regions serve.
Computational approaches to genome comparison have recently become a common research topic in computer science.
The development of computer-assisted mathematics (using products such as
Mathematica or
Matlab) has helped engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists to start operating in this domain, and a public collection
of case studies and demonstrations is growing, ranging from whole genome comparisons to gene expression analysis. . This has increased the introduction of different ideas,
including concepts from systems and control, information theory, strings analysis and data mining.
It is anticipated that computational approaches will become and remain a standard topic for research and teaching, while students fluent in both topics start being formed in the multiple courses created in the past few years.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Comparative Genomics'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://comparative_genomics.totallyexplained.com">Comparative genomics Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
