Research Symposium

BIO

I am Pacey Cheesebrough, a sophomore undergraduate student at Florida State University majoring in Biological Sciences. After achieving my BA in undergraduate, I plan to pursue higher education in medical school with a focus on emergency care. Ultimately, it is my dream to follow a career path in emergency medicine or research in virology to find treatments for rare diseases.

Estimating environmental heterogeneity between two populations exchanging migrants

Abstract

Two populations of the same species can sometimes live in completely different environments. Consequently, these differences can affect the long-term genetic variability of populations’ offspring, visible to us through genetic/genomic data. The software program MIGRATE utilizes DNA-sequenced data to form parameters (i.e. mutation rate) from which to estimate the heterogeneity of these two differing populations. Our aim is to utilize MIGRATE in simulations to test for environmental heterogeneity and its effects on two populations. We use Python scripts to generate DNA sequences which we then use in MIGRATE between two populations in different conditions. We check for environmental constraints or liberties and postulate what these differences are and when they arose.

Keywords: Biology, Scientific Computing, Coding, Phylogenetic Trees