Date of Award

2012

Document Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

Masters of Science (Research)

Department

Biological Sciences

First Advisor

Dr. Helen O'Shea

Abstract

Globally rotavirus is one of the most important causes of gastroenteritis in children and affects nearly all children by the age of 5 years. It also infects adults with most severe symptoms in the elderly or immune compromised. The most common strains associated with human rotavirus gastroenteritis are G1-G4 and G9 along with P[8],[6]and [4].All previous studies used only neighbour-joining method in the phylogenetic analysis of rotavirus genes. In this study rotavirus genes VP7 and VP4 for rotavirus strains G1 .G3 ,G9 , P[8] and P[4] were analysed in MEGA4.0 using both neighbour-joining and maximum parsimony. The main difference in the use of both methods was the time taken to run the analysis, the data sets were large and maximum parsimony method took at least double the time to run. Neighbour-joining is a distance based method and maximum parsimony a character based method, tree building in both cases use different algorithms. Based on the results of the analysis there was no major difference in results gained between the two methods.

Comments

Project Thesis in partial fulfilment for the degree of Masters In Computational Biology 2012.

Access Level

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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