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Freed from the competition of large raptors, Paleocene carnivores could expand their newly acquired habitats in search of prey. Such changing conditions might have led to their successful distribution and rapid radiation. Today, molecular evolutionary biologists are faced, however, with the consequences of such accelerated adaptive radiations, because they led to sequential speciation more rapidly than phylogenetic markers could be fixed. The repercussions being that current genealogies based on such markers are incongruent with species trees.Our aim was to explore such conflicting phylogenetic zones of evolution during the early arctoid radiation, especially to distinguish diagnostic from misleading phylogenetic signals, and to examine other carnivore-related speciation events. We applied a combination of high-throughput computational strategies to screen carnivore and related genomes in silico for randomly inserted retroposed elements that we then used to identify inconsistent phylogenetic patterns in the Arctoidea group, which is well known for phylogenetic discordances.Our combined retrophylogenomic and in vitro wet lab approach detected hundreds of carnivore-specific insertions, many of them confirming well-established splits or identifying and solving conflicting species distributions. Our systematic genome-wide screens for Long INterspersed Elements detected homoplasy-free markers with insertion-specific truncation points that we used to distinguish phylogenetically informative markers from conflicting signals. The results were independently confirmed by phylogenetic diagnostic Short INterspersed Elements. As statistical analysis ruled out ancestral hybridization, these doubly verified but still conflicting patterns were statistically determined to be genomic remnants from a time of ancestral incomplete lineage sorting that especially accompanied large parts of Arctoidea evolution., (© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

The Consensus Coding Sequence (CCDS) project (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CCDS/) is a collaborative effort to maintain a dataset of protein-coding regions that are identically annotated on the human and mouse reference genome assemblies by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and Ensembl genome annotation pipelines. Identical annotations that pass quality assurance tests are tracked with a stable identifier (CCDS ID). Members of the collaboration, who are from NCBI, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of California Santa Cruz, provide coordinated and continuous review of the dataset to ensure high-quality CCDS representations. We describe here the current status and recent growth in the CCDS dataset, as well as recent changes to the CCDS web and FTP sites. These changes include more explicit reporting about the NCBI and Ensembl annotation releases being compared, new search and display options, the addition of biologically descriptive information and our approach to representing genes for which support evidence is incomplete. We also present a summary of recent and future curation targets.

Motivation: Computational annotation of protein coding genes in genomic DNA is a widely used and essential tool for analyzing newly sequenced genomes. However, current methods suffer from inaccuracy and do poorly with certain types of genes. Including additional sources of evidence of the existence and structure of genes can improve the quality of gene predictions. For many eukaryotic genomes, expressed sequence tags (ESTs) are available as evidence for genes. Related genomes that have been sequenced, annotated, and aligned to the target genome provide evidence of existence and structure of genes., Results: We incorporate several different evidence sources into the gene finder AUGUSTUS. The sources of evidence are gene and transcript annotations from related species syntenically mapped to the target genome using TransMap, evolutionary conservation of DNA, mRNA and ESTs of the target species, and retroposed genes. The predictions include alternative splice variants where evidence supports it. Using only ESTs we were able to correctly predict at least one splice form exactly correct in 57% of human genes. Also using evidence from other species and human mRNAs, this number rises to 77%. Syntenic mapping is well-suited to annotate genomes closely related to genomes that are already annotated or for which extensive transcript evidence is available. Native cDNA evidence is most helpful when the alignments are used as compound information rather than independent positionwise information., Availability: AUGUSTUS is open source and available at http://augustus.gobics.de. The gene predictions for human can be browsed and downloaded at the UCSC Genome Browser (http://genome.ucsc.edu).

The University of California, Santa Cruz, Genome Browser Database (GBD) provides integrated sequence and annotation data for a large collection of vertebrate and model organism genomes. Seventeen new assemblies have been added to the database in the past year, for a total coverage of 19 vertebrate and 21 invertebrate species as of September 2007. For each assembly, the GBD contains a collection of annotation data aligned to the genomic sequence. Highlights of this year's additions include a 28-species human-based vertebrate conservation annotation, an enhanced UCSC Genes set, and more human variation, MGC, and ENCODE data. The database is optimized for fast interactive performance with a set of web-based tools that may be used to view, manipulate, filter and download the annotation data. New toolset features include the Genome Graphs tool for displaying genome-wide data sets, session saving and sharing, better custom track management, expanded Genome Browser configuration options and a Genome Browser wiki site. The downloadable GBD data, the companion Genome Browser toolset and links to documentation and related information can be found at: http://genome.ucsc.edu/.

GeneHub-GEPIS is a web application that performs digital expression analysis in human and mouse tissues based on an integrated gene database. Using aggregated expressed sequence tag (EST) library information and EST counts, the application calculates the normalized gene expression levels across a large panel of normal and tumor tissues, thus providing rapid expression profiling for a given gene. The backend GeneHub component of the application contains pre-defined gene structures derived from mRNA transcript sequences from major databases and includes extensive cross references for commonly used gene identifiers. ESTs are then linked to genes based on their precise genomic locations as determined by GMAP. This genome-based approach reduces incorrect matches between ESTs and genes, thus minimizing the noise seen with previous tools. In addition, the gene-centric design makes it possible to add several important features, including text searching capabilities, the ability to accept diverse input values, expression analysis for microRNAs, basic gene annotation, batch analysis and linking between mouse and human genes. GeneHub-GEPIS is available at http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/Research/genentech/genehub-gepis/ or http://www.gepis.org/.

The University of California, Santa Cruz Genome Browser Database contains, as of September 2006, sequence and annotation data for the genomes of 13 vertebrate and 19 invertebrate species. The Genome Browser displays a wide variety of annotations at all scales from the single nucleotide level up to a full chromosome and includes assembly data, genes and gene predictions, mRNA and EST alignments, and comparative genomics, regulation, expression and variation data. The database is optimized for fast interactive performance with web tools that provide powerful visualization and querying capabilities for mining the data. In the past year, 22 new assemblies and several new sets of human variation annotation have been released. New features include VisiGene, a fully integrated in situ hybridization image browser; phyloGif, for drawing evolutionary tree diagrams; a redesigned Custom Track feature; an expanded SNP annotation track; and many new display options. The Genome Browser, other tools, downloadable data files and links to documentation and other information can be found at http://genome.ucsc.edu/.

As more archaeal genomes are sequenced, effective research and analysis tools are needed to integrate the diverse information available for any given locus. The feature-rich UCSC Genome Browser, created originally to annotate the human genome, can be applied to any sequenced organism. We have created a UCSC Archaeal Genome Browser, available at http://archaea.ucsc.edu/, currently with 26 archaeal genomes. It displays G/C content, gene and operon annotation from multiple sources, sequence motifs (promoters and Shine-Dalgarno), microarray data, multi-genome alignments and protein conservation across phylogenetic and habitat categories. We encourage submission of new experimental and bioinformatic analysis from contributors. The purpose of this tool is to aid biological discovery and facilitate greater collaboration within the archaeal research community.

The University of California Santa Cruz Genome Browser Database (GBD) contains sequence and annotation data for the genomes of about a dozen vertebrate species and several major model organisms. Genome annotations typically include assembly data, sequence composition, genes and gene predictions, mRNA and expressed sequence tag evidence, comparative genomics, regulation, expression and variation data. The database is optimized to support fast interactive performance with web tools that provide powerful visualization and querying capabilities for mining the data. The Genome Browser displays a wide variety of annotations at all scales from single nucleotide level up to a full chromosome. The Table Browser provides direct access to the database tables and sequence data, enabling complex queries on genome-wide datasets. The Proteome Browser graphically displays protein properties. The Gene Sorter allows filtering and comparison of genes by several metrics including expression data and several gene properties. BLAT and In Silico PCR search for sequences in entire genomes in seconds. These tools are highly integrated and provide many hyperlinks to other databases and websites. The GBD, browsing tools, downloadable data files and links to documentation and other information can be found at http://genome.ucsc.edu/.

The University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) Genome Browser Database is an up to date source for genome sequence data integrated with a large collection of related annotations. The database is optimized to support fast interactive performance with the web-based UCSC Genome Browser, a tool built on top of the database for rapid visualization and querying of the data at many levels. The annotations for a given genome are displayed in the browser as a series of tracks aligned with the genomic sequence. Sequence data and annotations may also be viewed in a text-based tabular format or downloaded as tab-delimited flat files. The Genome Browser Database, browsing tools and downloadable data files can all be found on the UCSC Genome Bioinformatics website (http://genome.ucsc.edu), which also contains links to documentation and related technical information.