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，它们沿着染色体串在一起。因为染色体上彼此靠近的基因往往是一起遗传的，所以种群中只有所有可能的基因变异组合中的一个子集，它们之间产生统计关联。形成这种关联模式的重要生物学过程是减数分裂期间的基因重组。本研究探讨了决定染色体结合模式和重组率之间关系的进化力量，这种关系对形成遗传多样性至关重要。实验进化和自然种群的结合将被用来以前所未有的分辨率梳理形成秀丽隐杆线虫基因组遗传多样性的进化力量。拟议的研究将明确地测试长期存在的理论预测的一致性，这些理论预测控制着基因组关联模式和减数分裂重组之间的关系，并对两者进行仔细的实验测量。本研究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广泛应用于全基因组关联研究（在群体中搜索遗传变异）、连锁作图（在家庭中搜索）和进化基因组研究。在这项研究过程中制定的结果和方法将以开放获取的形式发表，这将有助于尽可能广泛地传播这项研究。这项研究的资助将为一名女博士生提供机会，从她的导师那里寻求独立的研究方向。

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.