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lab profile
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Chris Lane University of Rhode Island 120 Flagg Rd
Dept of Biological Sciences
Kingston, Rhode Island 2881
United States
clane@mail.uri.edu 401-874-2683
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PI: |
YES |
Taxa Studied: |
Other, Oomycetes Rhodophytes |
Techniques Employed: |
Sanger Sequencing, 454 Pyrosequencing, Solexa (Illumina) Sequencing, Bioinformatics/Sequence Analysis |
Research Description: |
Parasitic organisms have independently evolved in every major lineage of life on Earth, but despite both the medical, economic and agricultural impacts of parasites, very little is known about the process by which a species adopts a parasitic life style. Although researchers have characterized many of the cellular and genomic consequences of anciently derived parasites, such as Phytophthora (Irish potato blight) and Plasmodium (the causative agent of malaria), changes that occur in the initial stages of this evolutionary trajectory remain a mystery. The primary barrier to understanding early parasite evolution has been the difficulty in finding parasites with closely related free-living lineages with which to make comparisons. The Lane Lab focuses on genome evolution and gene family expansion and contraction in parasites. We are currently exploring two systems (oomycetes and red algae) using an "evolutionary gene networks" approach to better understand the effect that becoming a parasite has on the parasite’s genomes. |
Lab Web Page: |
http://cels.uri.edu/bio/lanelab/ |
Willing to Host Undergraduates: |
YES |
Actively Seeking Undergraduates: |
YES |
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