Comparative genomics to evolutionary studies in South American ciclhlids

• Grant number: 13/23465-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: March 01, 2014
• End date: February 29, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Genetics - Animal Genetics
• Principal Investigator: César Martins
• Grantee: Érica Ramos
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências (IBB). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Botucatu. Botucatu , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Next generation sequencing technique produces large amounts of data in a short period of time and low cost. This amount of DNA sequences can bring new insights to integration of citogenetic and genomic data, to better understand structural organization and evolution of genomes, detection of nucleotides variations, genes connected to diseases and functional approaches. Cichlid fishes experienced rapid and extensive adaptative radiation process, becaming a great model to evolutive studies. To African cichlids, some genomic and citogenetic studies have shown a conservative pattern in the genomic organization. In the other hand, genomic approaches are not being applied to the South American cichlids. The current citogenetic scenario to this group indicates that they present a greater variance than the African group, although both belong to the same family. Besides, large scale data still are a gap in neotropical cichlids knowledge and, if available, they can be valuable to other complementary studies. Therefore, this project aims to relate citogenetic and genomic data of South American cichlids, contributing to better understand its evolutive history, as well become genomic data available to further studies of these species. Our hypothesis is that the genomic organization of this group probably is more variable than the African cichlid group, based on its karyotype variation. (AU)