UseGalaxy.eu Use Case: Marine turtle tumour disease

Liam Whitmore from the Department of Biological Sciences School of Natural Sciences of the University of Limerick in Ireland works on marine turtle tumour disease. Thanks for using Galaxy for your research!

Our research is all focused around a marine turtle tumour disease known as fibropapillomatosis (FP). This disease causes multiple benign tumours to grow primarily on soft tissues of turtles, including: eyes, skin, and internal organs. It can be extremely debilitating, causing strandings and even death. The primary aetiological agent thought responsible for the onset of FP is a turtle-specific herpesvirus (chelonid herpesvirus 5, ChHV5) in conjunction with some sort of environmental co-trigger such as pollution. Current research suggests that an anthropogenic co-trigger immunocompromises turtles and allows an otherwise benign virus to pass an oncogenic threshold, leading to FP. Currently, we have been using Galaxy to align sequence data to ChHV5 genome, and build new consensus sequences to compare this virus phylogenomically and also to use these sequences to observe which genes are under evolutionary pressures (which genes are under selection and which genes are neutrally evolving). Link to our latest work: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/11/9/2489