Dr Fiona Robertson
Email - fiona.robertson@newcastle.ac.uk
Current position: Bioinformatician, Wellcome Centre for Mitochondrial Research, Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University
PhD Project: Development of sequence capture to study whole genome duplication in salmonids (Viva: August 2017)
Postgraduate research
My NERC funded PhD project aimed to develop a targeted sequence capture approach to obtain a large set of protein-coding genes across all genera of the salmonid fish family. The sequence capture approach was applied to obtain thousands of gene duplicates conserved from a salmonid-specific whole genome duplication (WGD) event (Lappin et al. 2016; Robertson et al. 2017). This has allowed high resolution evolutionary reconstructions of the role of WGD in salmonid genome evolution, including the validation of the 'lineage-specific ohnologue resolution' (LORe) model (Robertson et al. 2017), which is linked to delayed rediploidization post-WGD. I also used the sequence capture data to characterize the role of WGD in the expansion and diversification of salmonid gene families, including from the insulin-like growth factor system (Lappin et al. 2016), as well as the Hox clusters (Robertson et al. 2017).
Publications: while in Macqueen Lab
Lappin FM, Shaw RL, Macqueen DJ. 2016. Targeted sequencing for high-resolution evolutionary analyses following genome duplication in salmonid fish: Proof of concept for key components of the insulin-like growth factor axis. Mar Genomics. 30:15-26.
Robertson FM, Gundappa MK, Grammes F, Hvidsten TR, Redmond AK, Lien, S. Martin SAM, Holland PW, Sandve SR, Macqueen DJ. 2017. Lineage-specific rediploidization is a mechanism to explain time-lags between genome duplication and evolutionary diversification. Genome Biol. 18:111.
