The Genomics Education Partnership (GEP), a coalition of undergraduate institutions started by Dr. Sally Elgin of Washington University in St. Louis for the purpose of bringing original and authentic research opportunities to all undergraduate students, has announced the acceptance of its latest peer-reviewed publication based on student work. The paper is found in the journal G3: Genes,Genomes, Genetics and has among its authors Greg Robertson ’12, former Hampden-Sydney student Samuel Smith, and Assistant Professor of Biology Mike Wolyniak.  The paper, entitled “Drosophila Muller F elements maintain a distinct set of genomic properties over 40 million years of evolution”, examines how study of the fruit fly genomes can reveal a great deal about how different species develop and evolve over time.  Robertson, Smith, and Wolyniak examined individual sections of genomic sequence from a bioinformatics perspective, annotating the sequence for coding sequence start and stop sites and well as splice sites.

The GEP is one of several initiatives available to Hampden-Sydney biology students as they learn how to conduct real science during their time in Gilmer Hall.

A link to the paper may be found at http://g3journal.org/content/early/2015/03/04/g3.114.015966.abstract