Insights into the evolution of longevity from the bowhead whale genome.

The bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) is estimated to live over 200 years and is possibly the longest-living mammal. These animals should possess protective molecular adaptations relevant to age-related diseases, particularly cancer. Here, we report the sequencing and comparative analysis of the bowhead whale genome and two transcriptomes from different populations.

Whole genome phylogeny for 21 Drosophila species using predicted 2b-RAD fragments.

Type IIB restriction endonucleases are site-specific endonucleases that cut both strands of double-stranded DNA upstream and downstream of their recognition sequences. These restriction enzymes have recognition sequences that are generally interrupted and range from 5 to 7 bases long. They produce DNA fragments which are uniformly small, ranging from 21 to 33 base pairs in length (without cohesive ends).

A study on the distribution of 37 well conserved families of C2H2 zinc finger genes in eukaryotes.

Background: The C2H2 zinc-finger (ZNF) containing gene family is one of the largest and most complex gene families in metazoan genomes. These genes are known to exist in almost all eukaryotes, and they constitute a major subset of eukaryotic transcription factors. The genes of this family usually occur as clusters in genomes and are thought to have undergone a massive expansion in vertebrates by multiple tandem duplication events (BMC Evol Biol 8:176, 2008).

PolyLens: software for map-based visualisation and analysis of genome-scale polymorphism data.

Software tools for the flexible examination of genomic sequence information derived from populations of organisms in a geospatial context are few in number, closely tied to Web-based resources, generally focused on one or a few loci or haplotypes, and typically produce a global phylogeny as a summary of relatedness. We sought instead to produce a portable, self-contained analysis tool that is efficiently focused on a geospatial display of specifically chosen polymorphism frequencies or combination frequencies from very large data sets of genome-scale sequence from multiple individuals. PolyLens is a Java-based, integral visual analytical toolkit which can systematically process population genomic data, visualise geographic distributions of genealogical lineages, and display allele distribution patterns.

Whole genome phylogenies for multiple Drosophila species.

Background: Reconstructing the evolutionary history of organisms using traditional phylogenetic methods may suffer from inaccurate sequence alignment. An alternative approach, particularly effective when whole genome sequences are available, is to employ methods that don't use explicit sequence alignments. We extend a novel phylogenetic method based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to reconstruct the phylogeny of 12 sequenced Drosophila species.

A survey of well conserved families of C2H2 zinc-finger genes in Daphnia.

Background: A recent comparative genomic analysis tentatively identified roughly 40 orthologous groups of C2H2 Zinc-finger proteins that are well conserved in "bilaterians" (i.e. worms, flies, and humans).

An SVD-based comparison of nine whole eukaryotic genomes supports a coelomate rather than ecdysozoan lineage.

Background: Eukaryotic whole genome sequences are accumulating at an impressive rate. Effective methods for comparing multiple whole eukaryotic genomes on a large scale are needed. Most attempted solutions involve the production of large scale alignments, and many of these require a high stringency pre-screen for putative orthologs in order to reduce the effective size of the dataset and provide a reasonably high but unknown fraction of correctly aligned homologous sites for comparison.

Transgene manipulation in zebrafish by using recombinases.

Although much remains to be done, our results to date suggest that efficient and precise genome engineering in zebrafish will be possible in the future by using Cre recombinase and SB transposase in combination with their respective target sites. In this study, we provide the first evidence that Cre recombinase can mediate effective site-specific deletion of transgenes in zebrafish. We found that the efficiency of target site utilization could approach 100%, independent of whether the target site was provided transiently by injection or stably within an integrated transgene.

A comprehensive whole genome bacterial phylogeny using correlated peptide motifs defined in a high dimensional vector space.

As whole genome sequences continue to expand in number and complexity, effective methods for comparing and categorizing both genes and species represented within extremely large datasets are required. Methods introduced to date have generally utilized incomplete and likely insufficient subsets of the available data. We have developed an accurate and efficient method for producing robust gene and species phylogenies using very large whole genome protein datasets.

A comprehensive vertebrate phylogeny using vector representations of protein sequences from whole genomes.

We recently developed a method for producing comprehensive gene and species phylogenies from unaligned whole genome data using singular value decomposition (SVD) to analyze character string frequencies. This work provides an integrated gene and species phylogeny for 64 vertebrate mitochondrial genomes composed of 832 total proteins. In addition, to provide a theoretical basis for the method, we present a graphical interpretation of both the original frequency matrix and the SVD-derived matrix.

Integrated gene and species phylogenies from unaligned whole genome protein sequences.

Motivation: Most molecular phylogenies are based on sequence alignments. Consequently, they fail to account for modes of sequence evolution that involve frequent insertions or deletions. Here we present a method for generating accurate gene and species phylogenies from whole genome sequence that makes use of short character string matches not placed within explicit alignments.