Nevin D. Young, Principal Investigator

Patterns of Plant Gene Family Evolution

These researchers are investigating the mechanisms of evolution of large gene families in plant genomes. This involves inferring the evolutionary histories of a large number of gene families, both within single species and across multiple species, as well as making wholegenome comparisons to assess which genes have arisen through local duplications, large-scale genomic duplications, or other mechanisms. Several aspects of this project require substantial computing resources, including sequence alignments, calculations of phylogenetic trees (evolutionary histories), clustering of protein families, and whole-genome similarity comparisons.