#Team Members: Eric Gordon, Kaleigh Russell, Hoang Vuong, David Haisten
#This is the GitHub repository for our group project
For a group of closely related microbial species which inhabit the same or different niches, what are the major genomic differences between species and can they be explained evolutionarily by any factor (perhaps by habitat). For instance microbes from a “species” designated by 16S rDNA phylotyping with >97% sequence identity may be extremely divergent when comparing ortholog divergence as well as comparing gene classes. We will create a pipeline for handling raw fastq data of a microbe’s genome to assemble, annotate and compare to other already annotated genomes. We will identify orthologs of this newly assembled genome for constructing alignments, making gene and species trees and computing dN/dS of genes. We will also compare unique genes found only in a single taxon to see if they provide insight into this species ecology. We expect to find selection pressure and/or specific presence of genes for particular species which may relate to that microbe’s biology.