Wheaton published for genome research
Students , faculty make big strides in mapping sea urchin genome
Cassie Bohn '07
Issue date: 11/15/06 Section: News
Research in the sequencing of the sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) genome by a group of six Wheaton students, led by Biology Professor Robert Morris, will be published in two prestigious scientific journals, the college announced Thursday.
The group is part of the Sea Urchin Genome Sequencing Project Consortium that is led by the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College. Their work will be published in the Nov. 10 issue of the journal Science and a special Dec. 1 issue of Developmental Biology.
It is a rare honor for an undergraduate's work to appear in a scientific journal, and "the fact that six Wheaton students contributed enough research effort to be co-authors is a great credit to them and to the natural sciences at Wheaton," said Professor Morris in response to the announcement of his project's publication.
Morris's 30-plus member team included Assistant Biology Professor Shawn McCafferty, Jonah Cool '04, Erin Allgood '07, Ashlan Musante '08, Kyle Judkins '08, Blair Rossetti '09 and Amanda Rawson '09, all of whom will be listed as co-authors.
These undergraduates have achieved an honor that cannot even be claimed by most graduate students. The opportunity to work on such a project, and the experience they have gained in scientific research, however, are rewards in themselves.
"I'm very proud," Allgood told The Wire. "It's not quite real yet. Even seeing my name in print, it's not quite real."
This team sequenced 23,300 genes (814 million nucleotides), and found that many of them were similar to human genes.
In fact, humans and sea urchins shared an ancient, common ancestor that lived over 540 million years ago. Even though this relationship is extremely distant, the Wheaton team found many shared gene families: for example, some sea urchin genes code for the same sensory proteins that are necessary for complex human processes such as vision and hearing.
Surprisingly, however, the sea urchin immune system may be more complex than that of humans; it is coded for by ten to twenty times the number of genes that are found in the human immunity branch. Although gene-count does not necessarily correlate with complexity of function, this discovery certainly merits future study.
This project will prove itself invaluable in the scientific community through its comparison to the human genome. Differences and similarities between the two sequences will help geneticists to further understand the ways in which humans are related to, and unique from, other species. This comparison will also reveal some clues to our evolutionary past, as well as to the ways in which our species' genes have been affected by natural selection.
"It opens the door to seeing all these different processes that are happening at the genetic level," Allgood explained.
Many in the scientific community and society in general have turned their heads toward the relatively new field of genomics and the race to decipher the genetic code; the honey bee genome was also recently sequenced.
In a world that is becoming more and more interested in genes, the work of Professor Morris and his team has put Wheaton on the map.
The group is part of the Sea Urchin Genome Sequencing Project Consortium that is led by the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College. Their work will be published in the Nov. 10 issue of the journal Science and a special Dec. 1 issue of Developmental Biology.
It is a rare honor for an undergraduate's work to appear in a scientific journal, and "the fact that six Wheaton students contributed enough research effort to be co-authors is a great credit to them and to the natural sciences at Wheaton," said Professor Morris in response to the announcement of his project's publication.
Morris's 30-plus member team included Assistant Biology Professor Shawn McCafferty, Jonah Cool '04, Erin Allgood '07, Ashlan Musante '08, Kyle Judkins '08, Blair Rossetti '09 and Amanda Rawson '09, all of whom will be listed as co-authors.
These undergraduates have achieved an honor that cannot even be claimed by most graduate students. The opportunity to work on such a project, and the experience they have gained in scientific research, however, are rewards in themselves.
"I'm very proud," Allgood told The Wire. "It's not quite real yet. Even seeing my name in print, it's not quite real."
This team sequenced 23,300 genes (814 million nucleotides), and found that many of them were similar to human genes.
In fact, humans and sea urchins shared an ancient, common ancestor that lived over 540 million years ago. Even though this relationship is extremely distant, the Wheaton team found many shared gene families: for example, some sea urchin genes code for the same sensory proteins that are necessary for complex human processes such as vision and hearing.
Surprisingly, however, the sea urchin immune system may be more complex than that of humans; it is coded for by ten to twenty times the number of genes that are found in the human immunity branch. Although gene-count does not necessarily correlate with complexity of function, this discovery certainly merits future study.
This project will prove itself invaluable in the scientific community through its comparison to the human genome. Differences and similarities between the two sequences will help geneticists to further understand the ways in which humans are related to, and unique from, other species. This comparison will also reveal some clues to our evolutionary past, as well as to the ways in which our species' genes have been affected by natural selection.
"It opens the door to seeing all these different processes that are happening at the genetic level," Allgood explained.
Many in the scientific community and society in general have turned their heads toward the relatively new field of genomics and the race to decipher the genetic code; the honey bee genome was also recently sequenced.
In a world that is becoming more and more interested in genes, the work of Professor Morris and his team has put Wheaton on the map.
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