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

每个个体都有一个独特的基因变异组合，这些基因变异沿着他们的染色体串在一起。由于染色体上彼此接近的基因往往会一起遗传，因此种群中只包含所有可能的基因变异组合的一个子集，从而产生它们之间的统计关联。形成这种联合模式的重要生物学过程是减数分裂期间的遗传重组。本研究调查的进化力量，决定协会之间的关系模式和重组率沿着染色体，形成遗传多样性的关系至关重要。实验进化和自然种群的结合将被用来梳理除了在秀丽隐杆线虫基因组中形成遗传多样性的进化力量在一个前所未有的决议。拟议中的研究将明确测试长期以来的理论预测与仔细的实验测量两者的基因组关联和减数分裂重组模式之间的关系的一致性。从这项研究中对基因组关联模式和减数分裂重组率之间关系的全面理解将在全基因组关联研究（在人群中搜索遗传变异），连锁图谱（在家族内搜索）和进化基因组研究中得到广泛应用。在这项研究过程中形成的结果和方法将以开放获取的形式出版，这将有助于尽可能广泛地传播这项研究。这项研究的资金将提供一个女博士。学生有机会从事独立于导师的研究方向。

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.