Project:

Mitochondrial Reconstruction of Ecuadorian Snakes (Letptodeira, Chironius, and Dendrophidion) and the Isolation of COX1 for thei

Students:

Diya Amin, Eshaal Irfan

Institution:

St. John's University,

Mentors:

Juan C Santos

Abstract:

Our project aims to sequence RNA from six samples of unknown snakes. We will use bioinformatics to isolate mitochondrial sequences using baiting sequences from reference mitogenomes of known Neotropical snakes. The captured sequences would then be put together such that we aim to recover full mitogenomes of our unknown samples. After this, we will isolate their entire COX1 barcode gene and compare it with other similar sequences of related snakes available in public online databases (i.e., NCBI), which then will be aligned and used for species identification and phylogenetics. This research will allow us to develop an approach to identify tissues samples of unknown species as is usual in many biodiversity studies.

Poster:

Team samples: