Mentor: Dr. Matt Mead
I used alien index calculations and phylogenetics to identify candidate horizontal gene transfer events in Selaginella moellendorffii and Physcomitrella patens. I presented this work in a poster at the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Poster Fair. Mentor: Dr. Jen Wisecaver
I used the bioinformatics program antiSMASH to predict putative specialized biosynthetic gene clusters in a range of plant genomes. Next, I used the co-expression database ATTED-II to assess the co-expression of these putative clusters and the co-expression of known clusters. I found that very few of the predicted clusters showed patterns of co-expression while co-expression validated known clusters. In conclusion, I found that while genomic clustering exists, is not as powerful as co-expression in identifying novel plant metabolic pathways. This work is part of the publication, A Global Coexpression Network Approach for Connecting Genes to Specialized Metabolic Pathways in Plants. Mentor: Dr. Jen Wisecaver