Technological advances in DNA sequencing are enabling new areas of genomic research allowing fine connections between genomic variants and phenotype. We are studying transcriptomes and genomes from a variety of eukaryotic and prokaryotic non model organisms and have contributed to gain biological insights. At the moment we are collaborating with researchers in Corpoica, Colombia to continue the characterization of the Cape gooseberry transcriptome with additional data generated by next-generation sequencing technologies and have finalized the construction of a database using NCBI tools to display the newly assembled Cape gooseberry transcriptome. Additionally, we are in the process of analyzing interactions between plant growth promoting bacteria and banana plants. This is done in collaboration with Richa Agarwala and Roberto Vera Alvarez. In collaboration with I. King Jordan we studied the genetic ancestry and admixture patterns for an Afro-Colombian population and to compare its ancestry to other admixed American populations. We found that at the subcontinental level, the two Colombian populations from Choco and Medellin are far more similar to each other than to any of the other admixed American populations that were analyzed. The shared subcontinental ancestry between Colombian population groups can be taken to have implications for the roles of ethnic and cultural identity in the country. We contributed to the genome assembly and annotation of 15 genome sequences of Klebsiella sp. strains obtained from sugarcane fields to evaluate their potential use as plant growth-promoting biofertilizers. Assemblies were constructed using Illumina and the genomes were annotated with the NCBI Prokaryotic Genome Automatic Annotation Pipeline (PGAAP). This research was done in collaboration with I. King Jordan and Joel E. Kostka (Georgia Tech).
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