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Research
Interests:
My research
seeks to resolve phenotypic diversity in migration times of
salmonids with similar neutral marker genotypes. This work
is intended to help with management and conservation decisions
related to California’s Central Valley threatened Chinook
salmon stocks. Using a gene discovery approach, I seek to
gain insight into the gene expression patterns of migrating
Chinook salmon.
My focus will be on determining genetic differences in Chinook
salmon from the Feather River of California with separate
life-history patterns. Spring Chinook were thought to be extirpated
from the Feather River after the erecting of the Oroville
Dam. In recent years though, early returns of fall Chinook
have been arriving at the mitigation hatchery below the dam.
Microsatellite marker data shows these early returns to be
related closer to the fall run than extant spring Chinook
of geographically close systems. My main research questions
are: does differential gene expression explain the separate
return times? If so, which genes are up or down regulated
between these two life-history types? Which regulatory proteins
control regulation of transcription?
To answer these questions I am utilizing a relatively new
technology called LongSAGE (Figure 1). This allows efficient
sampling of the transcriptome with no prior knowledge of gene
expression. SAGE tags are generated, cloned and sequenced
giving up to 100,000 tags per sample. With this technology
I hope to identify and quantify the regulating transcripts
of Chinook salmon migration times.
Figure 1:LongSAGE process |
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