15 research outputs found
A call for public archives for biological image data
Public data archives are the backbone of modern biological and biomedical
research. While archives for biological molecules and structures are
well-established, resources for imaging data do not yet cover the full range of
spatial and temporal scales or application domains used by the scientific
community. In the last few years, the technical barriers to building such
resources have been solved and the first examples of scientific outputs from
public image data resources, often through linkage to existing molecular
resources, have been published. Using the successes of existing biomolecular
resources as a guide, we present the rationale and principles for the
construction of image data archives and databases that will be the foundation
of the next revolution in biological and biomedical informatics and discovery.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur
Rates of nucleotide substitution in sexual and anciently asexual rotifers
The class Bdelloidea of the phylum Rotifera is the largest well studied eukaryotic taxon in which males and meiosis are unknown, and the only one for which these indications of ancient asexuality are supported by cytological and molecular genetic evidence. We estimated the rates of synonymous and nonsynonymous substitutions in the hsp82 heat shock gene in bdelloids and in facultatively sexual rotifers of the class Monogononta, employing distance based and maximum likelihood methods. Relative-rate tests, using acanthocephalan rotifers as an outgroup, showed slightly higher rates of nonsynonymous substitution and slightly lower rates of synonymous substitution in bdelloids as compared with monogononts. The opposite trend, however, was seen in intraclass pairwise comparisons. If, as it seems, bdelloids have evolved asexually, an equality of bdelloid and monogonont substitution rates would suggest that the maintenance of sexual reproduction in monogononts is not attributable to an effect of sexual reproduction in limiting the load of deleterious nucleotide substitutions