Research on Population Genetics and Recombination

Over the past two decades the NIH, NSF, USDA, and DOE have invested billions of dollars into genomic sequencing. The data from these genome projects has given us new insight into the biological basis of disease, led to the development of new diagnostic tools, and recently contributed to the development of high throughput resequencing technologies (HTseq) that are revolutionizing biomedical research.

With recent technological breakthroughs, researchers can resequence the full genome of any individual at costs approaching 1,000.00 USD (the "thousand dollar genome" project). The resultant data will usher in an era of “personalized medicine” by enhancing our understanding of what makes individuals unique, helping physicians tailor treatments to individual patients, and identifying new genetic bases for the susceptibility, etiology, and pathogenesis of many diseases. Not to mention deepening our biological understanding on myriad levels.

The new challenge is making sense of this new wealth of genomic data as it is presented to us. Key unsolved questions are where does the biologically relevant variation reside and what are the structural, evolutionary, and genetic processes shaping this variation? Meiotic recombination lies at the nexus of these two questions.

Genetic mapping remains one of our primary tools for uncovering meaningful associations between genetic and phenotypic variation. In most eukaryotes, recombination is critical for ensuring proper chromosome segregation, facilitating DNA repair, and providing a basis for genetic diversity. Finally, by breaking up linkage relationships among loci, recombination allows different genomic regions to have varying evolutionary histories.