Upon sequencing a region of the Bacillus subtilis genome assigned to the author of this thesis, an open reading frame encoding a homologue of an HtrA-type serine protease, YkdA, was identified. The HtrA serine protease ...

To date this lab has carried out novel work in the area of low-molecular weight (<1 kDa) drug delivery to the retina (Campbell, Nguyen et al. 2009; Tam, Kiang et al. 2010). This work was carried by suppression of claudin-5 ...

Programmed cell death in the nematode C. elegans is the equivalent process to human apoptosis. Studying this process in the model organism has led to a great amount of knowledge about the details of pathway steps and ...

Filamentous fungi are important producers of secondary metabolites (SMs), together with plants and bacteria. While some SMs are toxic to humans, animals or plants, many others are beneficial. The discovery that the genes ...

Genetic novelty is the driving force behind evolution. Consequently, a large amount of genetic research is dedicated to determining the mechanisms behind, and the effects of, the creation of new genes. Where and when these ...

Prohibitin, an evolutionarily conserved gene situated on chromosome 17q21, was originally identified as a gene with antiproliferative properties. Studies of a Japanese population have shown prohibitin to be somatically ...

A modified genome scan, concentrating primarily on gene rich regions of the genome was employed by this group to search for regions harboring susceptibility loci for bipolar disorder in a panel of 48 Irish sib-pair families ...

A major difficulty associated with the design of gene therapies for autosomal dominant diseases is the immense intragenic heterogeneity often encountered in such conditions. Two strategies which circumvent the difficulties ...

The work in this thesis describes a novel approach to investigating the YycFG two-component signal transduction system of Bacillus subtilis. The YycFG TCSTS was found to be the only essential two-component signal transduction ...

I have built an automated annotation pipeline (named YGAP - Yeast Genome Annotation Pipeline), designed specifically for new yeast genome sequences lacking transcriptome data. YGAP uses homology and synteny information ...