DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Experimental tests of the evolutionary forces shaping linkage disequilibrium

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Each individual has a distinctive combination of gene variants strung together along their chromosomes. Because genes that are near one another on the chromosomes tend to be inherited together, populations harbor only a subset of all possible combinations of gene variants, yielding statistical associations between them. The vital biological process that shapes this association pattern is genetic recombination during meiosis. This study investigates the evolutionary forces that determine the relationship between association patterns and recombination rates along the chromosomes, a relationship crucial for shaping genetic diversity. A combination of experimentally evolved and natural populations will be used to tease apart the evolutionary forces shaping genetic diversity in the Caenorhabditis elegans genome at an unprecedented resolution. The proposed research will explicitly test the conformity of long-standing theoretical predictions governing the relationship between patterns of genomic association and meiotic recombination with careful experimental measurements of both. The comprehensive understanding of the relationship between genomic association patterns and meiotic recombination rates from this study will find widespread application in genome-wide association studies (which searches for genetic variants in populations), linkage mapping (which searches within families), and evolutionary genomic studies. The results and methodologies developed in the course of this research will be published in open-access format, which will facilitate the broadest possible dissemination of this research. Funding of this research will provide a female Ph.D. student with the opportunity to pursue an independent line of research from that of her mentor.