Quantity of questing black-legged ticks and associated micro-scale environmental data collected from four Suburban Parks near New York City.

During 2017 and 2018, we collected the quantity of questing black-legged ticks (), also known as deer ticks, in 124 sampling sites of 5m by 5m in four state parks-Caumsett State Historic Park, Connetquot River State Park, Rockefeller State Park, and Fire Island National Seashore-around New York City. The black-legged tick is the primary vector for the spirochete , the pathogen of Lyme disease, in Northeastern United States. Using the flagging method, we collected and counted the numbers of adult and nymphal black-legged ticks at each stie.

Genetic codes optimized as a traveling salesman problem.

The Standard Genetic Code (SGC) is robust to mutational errors such that frequently occurring mutations minimally alter the physio-chemistry of amino acids. The apparent correlation between the evolutionary distances among codons and the physio-chemical distances among their cognate amino acids suggests an early co-diversification between the codons and amino acids. Here we formulated the co-minimization of evolutionary distances between codons and physio-chemical distances between amino acids as a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and solved it with a Hopfield neural network.