Mosquito Transposon Database

Student Creators: Daisy Han, Simran Makwana, Nicholas Mosca, Evie Wan

This database was developed as a BF768 Final Project Spring 2020, in affiliation with Dr. Nelson Lau, under the supervision of Dr. Gary Benson.

---

The objective of our project is to create a database to classify transposable elements within four closely related mosquito species. Doing so will help achieve the biological goal of comparing transposons between species by percent abundance, and more. Mosquitos are known to be one of the most dangerous disease carrying vectors on earth. Among closely related species, their genome size can vary from .28 Gigabases (GB) to 2.54 (GB). Despite large differences in genome size, variance in number of genes is small. It is unclear as to why mosquito genome sizes vary so much between species yet still seem to code for similar genes. Investigating transposable elements may provide insight on these differences. Transposable elements are DNA sequences that can change position within the genome, which may lead to mutations in the host genome. Differences in transposable element distribution within related mosquito species may explain differences in genome size. Understanding the large difference in genome sizes among species could give valuable insight to the evolution and integration of transposons.