Oral presentation session 1 Computational inference of bacterial horizontal regulatory transfer in HemH , a core gene of E . coli

In this project, we assessed the degree of conservation between the regulatory regions of the HemH gene in several strains of E. coli using a computational tool developed in the Congdon lab. The upstream region to HemH is of particular interest because it is a core gene. HemH was also studied in a 2014 PNAS paper, which examined the conservation of this region and concluded that there was significant conservation, but that there were stretches of unconserved regions. The PNAS paper’s results were based on multiple sequence alignment comparisons; the approach used in the Congdon lab accounts for sequence shuffling and found that the best conserved DNA segments were evenly distributed across the HemH upstream region in a strain of E. coli. The Congdon lab’s computational tool provides a more comprehensive approach than multiple sequence alignment when used to assess the regulatory region of the HemH gene in E. coli.