Mrs. J. (Jifeng) Tang: "A bioinformatics approach to marker development"

The research focuses on two bioinformatics research topics: the development of tools for an efficient and reliable identification of single nucleotides polymorphisms (SNP) and polymorphic simple sequence repeats (SSR) from publicly available sequences, and the subsequent implementation of these tools in a pipeline to facilitate the identification of candidate genes related to some traits.

New algorithms were developed to reliably identify SNP and SSR markers in sequences. These algorithms were implemented in programs individually, called QualitySNP for detection of SNP, and PolySSR for detection of polymorphic SSR. The values of QualitySNP and PolySSR were demonstrated by the fact that nearly all tested SNP and SSR predicted to be polymorphic were indeed validated as polymorphic. Moreover, these programs were implemented in pipelines separately that include the identification of SNP or SSR, as well as storage and retrieval systems. Furthermore, QualitySNP and PolySSR have been implemented into a pipeline called GeneTagger to find candidate genes underlying special traits.