Thesis of Olivier Jaillon

2006 dec.

“Genome sequence of Tetraodon nigroviridis as a tool to establish the human gene repertoire and to analyze the evolution of the vertebrate chromosomes”

Olivier Jaillon supported his thesis on December 15th in Evry. His research was supervised by Jean Weissenbach and William Saurin.

  We compared the DNA sequence of the teleost fish Tetraodon nigroviridis to that of Homo sapiens to refine our knowledge of the structure and evolution of the vertebrate genome. First, under the hypothesis of neutral drift of genomic regions with no selective pressure, we developed a tool to identify evolutionary protein coding regions conserved between humans and T. nigroviridis. We thus provided the first reliable re-estimation of the total number of human genes, which was lower than expected. Secondly, by analyzing the mapping of orthologous genes from these 2 species, we refined the hypothesis of an ancient whole genome duplication in the teleost lineage. We inferred a rough draft of the organization of an ancestral vertebrate genome with 12 chromosomes and the major rearrangement events which led to the genome structure of humans and T. nigroviridis.

thesis of O. Jaillon