This award provides support for purchase of an automatic DNA sequencer and associated software. The instrument will be placed in a departmental DNA Sequencing Facility, a shared resource serving 22 faculty research groups in Biology and a smaller number of researchers in the Departments of Chemistry, Psychology, and Biomedical Engineering. The instrument will enhance research activities spaning the range of biological organization, from analyses of molecular evolution, genomics, and bioinformatics, to behavioral ecology, population biology and systematics. The instrumentation will also provide significant training opportunities as students are able to use the instruments in the facility to take their own samples through the entire process of data collection and analysis. The Facility is an important resource for our summer undergraduate research program, which provides research opportunities to students from non-research institutions, and for an advanced undergraduate course in molecular biology. The research projects of the faculty groups encompass a variety of topics, including population genetic analyses expected to facilitate conservation of biodiversity, molecular developmental studies of the genetic mechanisms underlying development in both plants and animals.
