Molecular Evolution

Genome Project

Bioinformatics

Astrobiology

Comparative genomics and molecular evolution studies can work synergistically bridging important areas in biological and biomedical research. Together, they can help us to reach a system-based understanding of the phenotypic diversity and evolution of organisms from the molecular perspective, the processes that shape molecular variation and genome plasticity, and ultimately elucidating the interactions between molecules, organisms, and communities in diverse environments.

The major questions guiding my research include: 1) How can we connect genomic information to phenotypic diversity and metabolic capabilities of organisms? 2) What processes shape the evolution of protein families generating the functional diversity that we observe in the contemporary organisms? 3) How can we infer biological adaptations to different environments from the analysis of protein families across diverse...

Research Insights

Mitochondrial genomes of plants are much larger than those of mammals and often contain conserved open reading frames (ORFs) of unknown function. Here, we show that one of these conserv...

Miniature tomato, S. lycopersicum cultivar Micro- Tom, was grown as described previously.22 Roots were harvested 5 weeks after germination. Hypocotyl and cotyledon were harvested 3 weeks after germination. Third leaves were harvested 3 weeks after germ....

Initial gene discovery efforts through analysis of genome sequences and identification and characterization of expressed RNAs have revealed that only a relatively small portion of the genome is transcribed into protein coding mRNAs ...

Comparative genetics and genomics use knowledge from different species to define important evolutionary relationships, an important aspect of which is the physical and genetic synteny (two or more homologous loci found on a single chromosome) and ...