Project properties

Title Bioinformatics & Insect evolutionary development
Group Biosystematics Group
Project type thesis
Credits 36
Supervisor(s) Wouter Makkinje
Examiner(s) Dr. R. van Velzen
Contact info Interested? Feel free to get in touch!
wouter.makkinje@wur.nl
Begin date 2023/01/09
End date 2024/07/03
Description : Interested in developing you bioinformatic skills, getting hands-on experience with transcriptome data and are you curious about the evolutionary development of insects?
In this project we aim to visualise global changes in developmental transcription patterns that have occurred throughout the evolution of insects. To accomplish this, RNAseq data from egg samples of E. vulgata collected at different developmental stages and similar data from online databases of D. melanogaster will be used.
With this information, we’ll be able to answer many evolutionary questions: “How did developmental time evolve from 8 days to only one? Have there been shifts in gene expression patterns between developmental stages? What implications do these changes have at the gene level?”
A good example of the intended results can be found in figure 5 of Li et al., 2014 (doi:10.1101/gr.170100.113).
Used skills Bioinformatics, bash, R, ssh, comparative transcriptomics, working with big data
Requirements Some experience with bioinformatics, familiar with command line/bash