Marine organism cell biology and regulatory sequence discoveryin comparative functional genomics.

The use of bioinformatics to integrate phenotypic and genomic data from mammalian models is well established as a means of understanding human biology and disease. Beyond direct biomedical applications of these approaches in predicting structure-function relationships between coding sequences and protein activities, comparative studies also promote understanding of molecular evolution and the relationship between genomic sequence and morphological and physiological specialization. Recently recognized is the potential of comparative studies to identify functionally significant regulatory regions and to generate experimentally testable hypotheses that contribute to understanding mechanisms that regulate gene expression, including transcriptional activity, alternative splicing and transcript stability.