Nicole Gruenheit

Background: Expression profiling has been proposed as a means for screening non-model organisms in their natural environments to identify genes potentially important in adaptive diversification. Tag profiling using high throughput...

Background: Transcriptome analysis is increasingly being used to study the evolutionary origins and ecology of non-model plants. One issue for both transcriptome assembly and differential gene expression analyses is the...

At first glance the three eukaryotic protein translocation machineries--the ER-associated degradation (ERAD) transport apparatus of the endoplasmic reticulum, the peroxisomal importomer and SELMA, the pre-protein translocator of complex plastids--appear quite...

The plastids of cryptophytes, haptophytes, and heterokontophytes (stramenopiles) (together once known as chromists) are surrounded by four membranes, reflecting the origin of these plastids through secondary endosymbiosis. They share this...

Background: Spliceosomal introns are an ancient, widespread hallmark of eukaryotic genomes. Despite much research, many questions regarding the origin and evolution of spliceosomal introns remain unsolved, partly due to the...

Background: Cryptophytes are highly compartmentalized organisms, expressing a secondary minimized eukaryotic genome in the nucleomorph and its surrounding remnant cytoplasm, in addition to the cell nucleus, the mitochondrion and the...

The covarion (COV)-like properties of sequences are poorly described and their impact on phylogenetic analyses poorly understood. We demonstrate using simulations that, under an evolutionary model where the proportion of...

Plastids are descended from a cyanobacterial symbiosis which occurred over 1.2 billion years ago. During the course of endosymbiosis, most genes were lost from the cyanobacterium's genome and many were...