Kevin Wright: Difference between revisions
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<h3>Who is Kevin Wright?</h3> | <h3>Who is Kevin Wright?</h3> | ||
I am a third year student | I am a third year biology graduate student co-advised by Dr. Mark Rausher and Dr. John Willis. I am broadly interested in how genetic interactions affect the adaptation to novel environments. In collaboration with Mark Rausher I have developed numerous evolution models to determine how metabolic and developmental networks respond to natural selection. Metabolic pathways are highly interactive systems in which changes in upstream enzymes generate cascading effects throughout a system; this result implies that under directional selection beneficial mutations will be preferentially fixed in upstream enzymes because they will have the greatest effect on network flux. Developmental networks are conversely characterized by highly buffered interactions due to the relationship between transcription factors and their targets. This means that directional selection on a target enzyme will cause genetic changes in the target enzyme or in its immediate upstream interactor, because changes further upstream in the developmental network will have little downstream phenotypic effects. | ||
In the laboratory of Dr. John Willis, I aim to test some of my theoretical interests in the Mimulus guttatus model system. Mimulus is currently being transformed into a model system for ecological genetic research because of the genomic tools currently being developed for the genus. These include a whole genome sequence by JGI, a EST collection of 200,000 transcripts, a physical map based on BAC library clones, and eventually Aligent microarrays. I aim to use these tools to investigate how M. guttatus has adapted to copper contaminated soil at an abandoned mining site in Copperopolis, CA. I am interested in understanding the genetic architecture of copper tolerance in this system and how it evolved. In particular, my collaborator David Lowry and I aim to clone the major copper tolerance locus identified by our collaborator Dr. Mark Macnair and QTL map the many modifying loci affecting copper tolerance. I want to understand how these loci interact to produce the copper tolerant phenotype. To this end, I will estimate the fitness effects of the major copper tolerance locus in a genetic background with and without additional modifier loci in a reciprocal transplant experiment using Near Isogenic Lines generated by backcrossing tolerant plants to nontolerant inbred lines. This experiment will provide insight into not only the genes affected by adaptation to this novel environment, but in how this adaptation was built via the contributions of multiple loci. | |||
==Field Site== | ==Field Site== | ||
Revision as of 17:12, 23 October 2006
Who is Kevin Wright?
I am a third year biology graduate student co-advised by Dr. Mark Rausher and Dr. John Willis. I am broadly interested in how genetic interactions affect the adaptation to novel environments. In collaboration with Mark Rausher I have developed numerous evolution models to determine how metabolic and developmental networks respond to natural selection. Metabolic pathways are highly interactive systems in which changes in upstream enzymes generate cascading effects throughout a system; this result implies that under directional selection beneficial mutations will be preferentially fixed in upstream enzymes because they will have the greatest effect on network flux. Developmental networks are conversely characterized by highly buffered interactions due to the relationship between transcription factors and their targets. This means that directional selection on a target enzyme will cause genetic changes in the target enzyme or in its immediate upstream interactor, because changes further upstream in the developmental network will have little downstream phenotypic effects.
In the laboratory of Dr. John Willis, I aim to test some of my theoretical interests in the Mimulus guttatus model system. Mimulus is currently being transformed into a model system for ecological genetic research because of the genomic tools currently being developed for the genus. These include a whole genome sequence by JGI, a EST collection of 200,000 transcripts, a physical map based on BAC library clones, and eventually Aligent microarrays. I aim to use these tools to investigate how M. guttatus has adapted to copper contaminated soil at an abandoned mining site in Copperopolis, CA. I am interested in understanding the genetic architecture of copper tolerance in this system and how it evolved. In particular, my collaborator David Lowry and I aim to clone the major copper tolerance locus identified by our collaborator Dr. Mark Macnair and QTL map the many modifying loci affecting copper tolerance. I want to understand how these loci interact to produce the copper tolerant phenotype. To this end, I will estimate the fitness effects of the major copper tolerance locus in a genetic background with and without additional modifier loci in a reciprocal transplant experiment using Near Isogenic Lines generated by backcrossing tolerant plants to nontolerant inbred lines. This experiment will provide insight into not only the genes affected by adaptation to this novel environment, but in how this adaptation was built via the contributions of multiple loci.
