Comparative and evolutionary genomics of marine animals and arthropods of veterinary interest

Short description:

The project will be developed through a bioinformatic approach applied to genomic data generated using the Illumina technology. Genomic sequences (18 gigabases/taxon) are available for more than one hundred species of Crustacea, Teleost Fishes and Hymenoptera. Comparative and evolutionary studies will be performed on the mitochondrial genomes of a selected group of taxa. The nuclear genes will be also analysed to identify slow and fast evolving markers useful for species identification. The study will be extended to the genomic sequences, already identified with BLAST, that belong to viruses, bacteria and protists, infecting these animals. The bioinformatics analyses will be performed using a cluster of servers already available in the laboratory of the proponent of the project.

Five publications related to the Research Topic for the interview:

  1. Boore JL.1999. Animal mitochondrial genomes. Nucleic Acids Res, 27:1767-1780.
  2. Cameron SL. 2014. Insect mitochondrial genomics: implications for evolution and phylogeny. Annu Rev Entomol. 59:95–117.
  3. Bernt, M, Middendorf, M. 2011. A method for computing an inventory of metazoan mitochondrial gene order rearrangements. BMC Bioinformatics 12(Suppl 9), S6, doi:10.1186/1471-2105-12-S9-S6.
  4. Boore JL. 2006. The use of genome-level characters for phylogenetic reconstruction. Trends Ecol. Evol. 21, 439–446.
  5. Song F et al. 2016. Capturing the phylogeny of Holometabola with mitochondrial genome data and Bayesian site-heterogeneous mixture models. Genome Biol Evol. 8:1411–1426.