Architecture and Evolution of Xylem-related Gene Coexpression Networks in Poplars

With the advent of sequencing technologies, a variety of methods have been available day by day. Each of these methods have helped scientists to for a deeper understanding of the biological function and evolutionary constraints on the relevant genes, which can be gained through the use of modern computational approaches. Numerous approaches have being developed to advance these goals, and interaction network mapping is one of them. This method has been employed to study a variety of organisms to illustrate shared (conserved) or individual (unique) properties, and is mainly based on identifying and visualizing modules of co-expressed genes. As being a very strong candidate for such tools, co-expression gene network was used in this study to indentify the genes in wood formation of Populus trichocarpa with the help of the other novel bioinformatics tools such as Gene Ontology and Cytoscape.

In order to booster the accuracy of the findings, we have combined it with an evolutionary approach, synonymous and non-synonymous ratio (dN/dS) of the proteins to show the selective patterns of the genes in a comparative fashion between woody and non-woody plants.

This thesis is proposed to help plant scientists to gain insights into the genes that are involved in wood formation. By taking advantage of the computational studies have been done on this paper, one can validate the experiments along with reducing the cumbersomeness of the lab trials on the topic of wood formation in plants