| The pilot project is part of a large ongoing project. We aim to investigate in vertebrates the evolution of genes orientated in a head-to-head fashion with less than 1 kb between their transcriptional starts. Such genes pairs are thought to have bi-directional promoters and has been shown to be enriched in the human genome. This could indicate some kind of functional constraints for establishing and keeping genes in a head-to-head orientation. To make reliable reconstructions of the evolution of head-to-head genes, it is of importance to know exactly the phylogenetic relationships and in some cases the time of divergence between the investigated species. We therefore work on the establishment of phylogenetic relationships and time of divergence of relevant mammals and vertebrates to provide a phylogenetic scaffold when selecting species used for our research. A variety of these analyses, such as maximum likelihood analyses (e.g. with PAML), Bayesian analyses (e.g. with MRBAYES) and time divergence analyses (e.g. with MULTIDIVT! IME), requires strong computer capacity which we will perform on the (super)computer. |
