TITLE:

GENES WITHOUT BORDERS: A SURVEY OF MOBILE GENETIC ELEMENTS IN GENOMES AND METAGENOMES

DATE:

Friday, March 18th, 2011

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS 214

SPEAKER:

Ramy Karam Aziz, PhD

ABSTRACT:

Genes, like organisms, struggle for existence, and the most successful genes persist and widely disseminate in nature. The unbiased determination of the most successful genes requires access to sequence data from a wide range of phylogenetic taxa and ecosystems, which has finally become achievable thanks to the deluge of genomic and metagenomic sequences. The analysis of 10 million protein-encoding genes and gene tags in sequenced bacterial, archaeal, eukaryotic and viral genomes and metagenomes, demonstrates that several genes belonging to bacteriophages and other mobile genetic elements are among the most abundant and most ubiquitous genes on the planet. In this presentation, I will show the patterns of distribution of these mobile elements in microbial genomes, and in environmental and human-associated metagenomes. I will discuss the different metrics developed in our laboratory for the evaluation of the abundance, ubiquity, coverage, and distribution patterns of phage genes and genomes. Finally, I will demonstrate how phage distribution patterns are usually correlated with the ecological distribution of their microbial hosts. The prevalence of mobile genetic elements in nature is significant as they contribute to the diversification of genes and genomes while acting, at the same time, as predators or genome parasites.

HOST:

Rob Edwards

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