College of Biological Sciences
Twin Cities
These researchers have collected extensive pooled bacterial sequencing data from select-and-resequence evolution experiments, which allow them to study the interactions of plants with multi-strain communities of microbes, instead of just one strain at a time. Typically, each experiment results in 50–200 Illumina libraries, leading to several publications. They have also called variants for ~300 Medicago accessions using using a new reference genome. These variant calls have already been made public, and they should be useful to the model legume community.
The researchers are currently working on integrating coexpression networks with their previous genomic analyses. For example, they have gene expression data (RNA-seq) from 96 samples, obtained from multiple Medicago species inoculated with a pool of Ensifer bacteria. This is a novel combination of the select-and-resequence method, with a gene expression study. The researchers plan to analyze these data over the coming year. The data are accompanied by higher-depth re-sequencing of several of the Medicago species in the experiment. A previous experiment that focused only on host gene expression has been published.
This group's research was featured on the MSI website in July 2019: Evaluating Species Distribution Models.