Financing: Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)

Project reference Nr.: G.0318.05
Start: 2005-01-01
End: 2008-12-31

Description:
In this project we will try to demonstrate the role of transcriptional subfunctionalization as a driving force for the functional divergence of duplicated genomes. Therefore we use comparative analysis of promoters and their regulatory elements in orthologous and paralogous genes. Computational methods are developed to identify regulatory elements and to subsequently study their evolution in duplicated genes. The in silico detection of regulatory elements is based on de novo motif detection methods which should be adapted to cope with the inherent noise. Although the methods will be generic enough to search for motifs in eucaryotes, the project will be focusing on higher plants. Recent research from the team of Prof. Van de Peer showed that genomes of plants exhibit a complicated and rich history of complete and partial genome duplications. Therefore is the number of duplicated genes very large in plants and this makes plants an ideal model organism to study the role of subfunctionalization. Moreover, the availability of additional plant genomes gives a big advantage when applying comparative analysis to promoter regions in multiple plant species. Futhermore, the relation between duplication, redundance of genes and subfunctionalization on the evolution of genes is a barely studied research topic.
 

SMC people involved in the project:

• Kathleen Marchal (Coordinator)
• Bart De Moor (Promoter)
• Pieter Monsieurs (Team member)