Distinguishing the Pax6 Paralogs Eyeless and Twin of Eyeless
2023 Undergraduate Research Symposium
Katelynn Haygood (environmental science and geology)
Faculty mentor: Markus Friedrich
Abstract
The Pax6 gene is well known for its importance in developing the visual system. The gene is able to, in the early stages of the embryo, place eye location, and control eye function. Many species of arthropods and arachnids normally possess two copies of the Pax6 gene called the eyeless and the twin of the eyeless (Yang 2009). Both genes are essential for the development of the ocular head segment (Luan et al. 2014).
The horseshoe crab Limulus polyphemus has more Pax6 genes than most arthropods (Friedrich, 2022), i.e., two homologs of eyeless and three homologs of twin of eyeless. Horseshoe crabs represent an ancient chelicerate lineage and are known as some of the world's living fossils that are over 445 million years old. In this project, we were studying the horseshoe crab eyeless and twin of eyeless protein sequences to identify sequence regions that distinguish the two closely related paralogs.
Poster
Using the Unusually Gene Duplication Rich Horseshoe Crab Genome to Define Protein Sequence Domains that Distinguish the Pax6 Paralogs Eyeless and Twin of Eyeless Across the Arthropods
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Katelynn Haygood: Using the Unusually Gene Duplication Rich Horseshoe Crab Genome to Define Protein Sequence Domains that Distinguish the Pax6 Paralogs Eyeless and Twin of Eyeless Across the Arthropods