Genomic analysis of the blood attributed to Louis XVI (1754-1793), king of France.

A pyrographically decorated gourd, dated to the French Revolution period, has been alleged to contain a handkerchief dipped into the blood of the French king Louis XVI (1754-1793) after his beheading but recent analyses of living males from two Bourbon branches cast doubts on its authenticity. We sequenced the complete genome of the DNA contained in the gourd at low coverage (~2.5×) with coding sequences enriched at a higher ~7.

Pool and conquer: new tricks for (c)old problems.

The early period of genetics is closely associated with the study of chromosomal inversions. For almost a century, evolutionary biologists found evidence for the role of inversions in central processes such as adaptation and speciation. In spite of huge efforts, many questions remain about the evolutionary forces underlying the distribution and dynamics of inversions in natural populations.

Derived immune and ancestral pigmentation alleles in a 7,000-year-old Mesolithic European.

Ancient genomic sequences have started to reveal the origin and the demographic impact of farmers from the Neolithic period spreading into Europe. The adoption of farming, stock breeding and sedentary societies during the Neolithic may have resulted in adaptive changes in genes associated with immunity and diet. However, the limited data available from earlier hunter-gatherers preclude an understanding of the selective processes associated with this crucial transition to agriculture in recent human evolution.

1000 Genomes Selection Browser 1.0: a genome browser dedicated to signatures of natural selection in modern humans.

Searching for Darwinian selection in natural populations has been the focus of a multitude of studies over the last decades. Here we present the 1000 Genomes Selection Browser 1.0 (http://hsb.

Intelligent client for integrating bioinformatics services.

Motivation: In addition to existing bioinformatics software, a lot of new tools are being developed world wide to supply services for an ever growing, widely dispersed and heterogeneous collection of biological data. The integration of these resources under a common platform is a challenging task. To this end, several groups are developing integration technologies, in which services are usually registered in some sort of catalogue to allow novel discovering and accessing mechanisms to be implemented.