Thesiss

Peronospora tabacina Adam. is the causal agent of blue mold or downy mildew of tobacco. The pathogen is a fungus-like organism and is a member of the Oomycota. P. tabacina is an obligate parasite restricted to species in the genus Nicotiana . Identification of the pathogen is di…

There are many ways to culture a single celled organism, each way uniquely capable of answering a different biological question. Continuous culture, a form of growing organisms in which fresh medium is continually added to dilute out the doubling microbe, has existed for decades…

The ability of populations to adapt depends on a complex suite of traits including mutation and recombination rates and functional constraints on genes subject to selection. How much selection can act on these traits to promote adaptability remains an open question. This dissert…

Identical-by-descent (IBD) segments carry important information on genetic relatedness between individuals and therefore are used widely for statistical inference in population genetics. In this work, we focus on the inference of the genome-wide mutation rate using IBD segments.…