Plant, Animal & Microbe Genomes X Conference

January 12-16, 2002
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Bioinformatics: Algorithms
             

GENOMIC ANALYSIS OF PATHWAYS IN FULLY SEQUENCED GENOMES

¹ Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, Karolinska Institutet, S171 77 Stockholm, Sweden

Sequencing of entire genomes has been accomplished for several species including Homo sapiens, Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, Arabidopsis thaliana, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Data available from such sequencing projects permits in-depth analysis of genomes including their evolution, gene order conservation, clustering of genes, and identification of duplication of genomic regions. We are using two approaches. The first involves the investigation of clustering of genes in pathways. We analyze genes involved in individual metabolic pathways and determine if genes involved in pathways cluster in eukaryotes. We find that genes from a pathway are significantly more clustered than we would expect by chance. Our investigation indicates that there are differences in the amount of clustering both between pathways and between organisms. Our second approach is to identify orthologs between species and investigate their genomic locations. From genomic locations of orthologous genes we can determine if there are conserved regions between genomes.