Differential gene expression between sexes is the main contributor of the morphological and behavioral differences observed between them. Studying the signatures of these differences at the genetic level will help us understand the forces acting on them. The existence of androdioecious and gonochoristic species in the genus Caenorhabditis makes it suitable for sex-biased gene expression studies. In this thesis, I have assembled the transcriptome of C. sp. 9 and C. sp. 5 using de novo and reference-based techniques. Evolutionary analysis of the assembled contigs showed that genes with male-biased expression evolve faster than those with a female bias, as observed in other taxa. Furthermore, I found a positive correlation between gene expression and codon usage bias.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/33502 |
| Date | 26 November 2012 |
| Creators | Rajagopalan, Deepthi |
| Contributors | Cutter, Asher |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
Page generated in 0.0059 seconds