Game and Nongame Bird Pesticide Exposure

Our project studies toxicogenomics in wild birds using domestic chickens and sharp-tailed grouse as model species. We employ genome-reducing RNA-seq framework with next-generation sequencing data to identify biomarkers and evaluate gene expression related to immune suppression due to neonicotinoid pesticides. Time-series data of blood and other immune tissues will be collected to generate up to 56 whole transcriptome samples using Illumina HiSeq paired-end reads. We perform standard Bioinformatics and statistical analyses (e.g. quality control of high-throughput sequencing data, mapping to reference genomes and de novo assembly, BLAST comparison for functional annotation, and normalization) in high performance computing system to analyze differential gene and transcript expression.