Understanding the functionality of transcript diversity

Recent years have seen a huge increase in the amount of genomic DNA
being sequenced from a wide variety of organisms, giving us an unprecedented
insight into the molecular diversity seen in nature. As a
result a host of methods have been developed, both experimental and
computational, to understand the functional significance of such diversity
and how it relates to organismal and environmental complexity.
In this thesis I use comparative approaches to explore two areas of
molecular biology where there is evidence for large amounts of transcript
diversity. Firstly, I explore the unprecedented view of microbial
sequence diversity offered by metagenomic sequencing projects, using
sequence similarity and adapted genomic context methods to quantify
the amount of functional novelty in these samples. Secondly, I look
at the transcript diversity generated by alternative splicing. I develop
methods to detect and visualise alternative splicing events and apply
these to the detection of conserved alternative splicing events.