Identifying Functional Orthologs between Homo Sapiens and Mus Musculus

Over billions of years, organizms have gone through evolutionary events called specification, during which individuals' genes are mutated and diverge from one another resulting in a new diversity of proteins, interactions, functions, and ultimately, species. Using sequence alignments, researchers attempt to re-create a phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, tracing genes in various species back to a single gene in a shared ancestral organism. Genes in the same tree are often assumed to carry out similar functions within their respective species, yet without understanding the functionality and regulation of the protein itself, this characterization is naive. The alternative method that I have proposed provides a new method to finding similar genes across species by comparing functional genomics data in addition to the genetic sequence similarities, allowing researchers to accurately verify and compare current pathway models as well as begin to reconstruct new pathways in organisms that have little or no characterization.unpublishednot peer reviewedU of I OnlyUndergraduate senior thesis not recommended for open acces