WHOLE GENOME RANAVIRUS PHYLOGENIES: AN IN-DEPTH LOOK

Ranaviruses are a group of globally emerging pathogens in amphibians, fish, and reptiles. They have been associated with the declines of several species and are known to affect several endangered species. Forty-two full Ranavirus genomes were obtained from GenBank and will be aligned using the MAFFT multiple sequence alignment program. Sequences will then be imported into the Molecular Evolutionary Genetic Analysis (MEGA) software program to analyze the sequences and determine the best nucleotide substitution model that will be used in the tree building algorithm. We will create maximum likelihood and neighbor joining trees and compare them to the published trees, most of which have only been made with small portions of the genome. Additionally, we will compare the complete genome trees to one made using only the major capsid protein (MCP) from the genomes from GenBank. The MCP trees will be built in the afore-mentioned manner. We anticipate that since the MCP is a highly conserved gene, the tree made with the whole genome will have similar branching patterns