Population genetics
Evolution of bacteria
Information science has been applied to biology to produce the field called Bioinformatics. Hundreds of bacterial genomes, as well many eukaryotes have been fully sequenced and the information stored in databases such as GenBank and EMBL. Further storage, organization and indexing of sequence information are also part of Bioinformatics.
Computational Biology is the name given to the analysis of sequence information and it involves the following:-
Finding the genes in the DNA sequences of various organisms
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Developing methods to predict the structure and/or function of newly discovered proteins and structural RNA sequences
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Clustering protein sequences into families of related sequences and the development of protein models
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Aligning similar proteins and generating phylogenetic trees to examine evolutionary relationships
Evolution has
produced DNA sequences that encode proteins with very specific functions. It
is possible to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein using
algorithms derived from our knowledge of physics, chemistry
and most importantly, from the analysis of other proteins with similar amino
acid sequences.
A
population is a part of a
species including organisms with common properties at a given time and usually geographic place.
Population genetics
Population genetics applies both to how the mechanisms (mutation, migration, natural selection, genetic drift) influence the evolutionary rate of change in the populations as well as a historical investigation of when pathogens have evolved.
Population genetic investigations determine
population structures, the nature of allelic variation and the role of
different modes of recombination in generating genotypic variation.
This site is maintained by Henrik Christensen
to present teaching and research activities.
I can be contacted by email: hech [at] life.ku.dk
Simplified 16S rRNA gene sequence based phylogeny of genera, species and species-like taxa of Pasteurellaceae
