Achievement

IGERT Trainees Julian Catchen and Conor O’Brien created tools to develop the first Agilent expression microarray for threespine stickleback. Conor is examining patterns of transcriptional profiles across the photoperiodic response in stickleback. Conor and Julian began using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology to perform transcriptional profiling. NGS technologies can generate many millions of sequencing reads in a single run, making it possible to re-sequence genomes within three days at a cost of a few thousand dollars. This integrative work is providing insights into the use of NGS technologies for studies of evolutionary genetics and biomedicine. NGS technology is becoming increasingly common in many genetic studies and clinical applications. Because this work involves the use of large amounts of novel sequence data, the correct approach necessitated the interactions among laboratories and trainees with different backgrounds and expertise encouraged by our IGERT program.