Eastern African environmental variation and its role in the evolution and cultural change of Homo over the last 1 million years.

Characterizing eastern African environmental variability on orbital timescales is crucial to evaluating the hominin evolutionary response to past climate changes. However, there is a dearth of high-resolution, well-dated records of ecosystem dynamics from eastern Africa that cover long time intervals. In the last 1 Myr, there were significant anatomical and cultural developments in Homo, including the origin of Homo sapiens.

ExactSearch: a web-based plant motif search tool.

Background: Plant biologists frequently need to examine if a sequence motif bound by a specific transcription or translation factor is present in the proximal promoters or 3' untranslated regions (3' UTR) of a set of plant genes of interest. To achieve such a task, plant biologists have to not only identify an appropriate algorithm for motif searching, but also manipulate the large volume of sequence data, making it burdensome to carry out or fulfill.

Result: In this study, we developed a web portal that enables plant molecular biologists to search for DNA motifs especially degenerate ones in custom sequences or the flanking regions of all genes in the 50 plant species whose genomes have been sequenced.