W.M. Keck Foundation grant for discovery of active transposable elements in mosquitos

 We will be working on discovery of active transposable element discovery in three mosquitos thanks to a grant that began this year from the W. M. Keck Foundation.  We will be using Illumina based resequencing of populations of mosquitos, RNA-Seq to study expression of genes and TEs to determine differences between active and silenced elements, bioinformatics to identify and characterize transposable elements in the genomes of 3 mosquitos, and experimentally test for activity of the transposases that are thought to match the target TEs.  The grant is highlighted in a campus press release and will be a collaboration between our lab and the labs of Dr Susan Wessler, and Dr Peter Atkinson. Should be a fun exploration and will help inform other TE work in the laboratory as well.