Gene content evolution in the arthropods

Arthropods comprise the largest and most diverse phylum on Earth and play vital roles in nearly every ecosystem. Their diversity stems in part from variations on a conserved body plan, resulting from and recorded in adaptive changes in the genome. Dissection of the genomic record of sequence change enables broad questions regarding genome evolution to be addressed, even across hyper-diverse taxa within arthropods. Using 76 whole genome sequences representing 21 orders spanning more than 500 million years of arthropod evolution, we document changes in gene and protein domain content and provide temporal and phylogenetic context for interpreting these innovations. We identify many novel gene families that arose early in the evolution of arthropods and during the diversification of insects into modern orders. We reveal unexpected variation in patterns of DNA methylation across arthropods and examples of gene family and protein domain evolution coincident with the appearance of notable phenotypic and physiological adaptations such as flight, metamorphosis, sociality, and chemoperception. These analyses demonstrate how large-scale comparative genomics can provide broad new insights into the genotype to phenotype map and generate testable hypotheses about the evolution of animal diversity

Phylo: A Citizen Science Approach for Improving Multiple Sequence Alignment

BACKGROUND: Comparative genomics, or the study of the relationships of genome structure and function across different species, offers a powerful tool for studying evolution, annotating genomes, and understanding the causes of various genetic disorders. However, aligning multiple sequences of DNA, an essential intermediate step for most types of analyses, is a difficult computational task. In parallel, citizen science, an approach that takes advantage of the fact that the human brain is exquisitely tuned to solving specific types of problems, is becoming increasingly popular. There, instances of hard computational problems are dispatched to a crowd of non-expert human game players and solutions are sent back to a central server. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We introduce Phylo, a human-based computing framework applying "crowd sourcing" techniques to solve the Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) problem. The key idea of Phylo is to convert the MSA problem into a casual game that can be played by ordinary web users with a minimal prior knowledge of the biological context. We applied this strategy to improve the alignment of the promoters of disease-related genes from up to 44 vertebrate species. Since the launch in November 2010, we received more than 350,000 solutions submitted from more than 12,000 registered users. Our results show that solutions submitted contributed to improving the accuracy of up to 70% of the alignment blocks considered. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We demonstrate that, combined with classical algorithms, crowd computing techniques can be successfully used to help improving the accuracy of MSA. More importantly, we show that an NP-hard computational problem can be embedded in casual game that can be easily played by people without significant scientific training. This suggests that citizen science approaches can be used to exploit the billions of "human-brain peta-flops" of computation that are spent every day playing games. Phylo is available at: http://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca

Natural History Museum

Exterior detai

Manchester Town Hall

Interio

Balliol College

General view, showing the south elevation and the gate at right, looking north; Balliol College, founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. The buildings are grouped in the Front Quadrangle and Garden Quadrangle. The oldest parts of the College are the north and west ranges of the front quadrangle, dated to 1431. Alfred Waterhouse designed the main Broad Street frontage of the college, with gateway and tower, known as the Brackenbury Buildings, in 1867-1868. Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 7/14/2008

Natural History Museum

exterior, 2017Cromwell Rd, Kensington, London SW7 5BD, U

General description of design : courts of justice competition

submitted by Alfred WaterhouseFehlende Tafeln: IV, VII-XI, XIX-XXHandschriftliches Exlibris: "Edmund Ashwatte Esq." 000091008_0001 Exemplar der ETH-BI

Natural History Museum

exterior, view of ornate terracotta facade, 2017Cromwell Rd, Kensington, London SW7 5BD, U

Balliol College

View along the south elevation, looking west; Balliol College, founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. The buildings are grouped in the Front Quadrangle and Garden Quadrangle. The oldest parts of the College are the north and west ranges of the front quadrangle, dated to 1431. Alfred Waterhouse designed the main Broad Street frontage of the college, with gateway and tower, known as the Brackenbury Buildings, in 1867-1868. Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 7/14/2008