Tunicates are closest living relatives of vertebrates
One of Charles Darwin’s most revolutionary idea was that all living things are related to one another (to different extents) through common decent (share common ancestors),connected to each other like branches of a huge “Tree of life”.
So what can we expect at the root of this giant tree?
At the base of the tree lies a 3.8 billions year old ancestor ,which gave rise to all living forms present on earth today.Thus making us all belong to one huge family and so by understanding the …

There was a mad rush to get to the base of animal tree of life in the past twelve months, in order to establish most primitive animal on our planet, with many phylogenomics studies contradicting each other. In April 2008, Cassey dunn et el published their famous phylogenomics work in Nature, which placed Ctenophores at the base of the tree making them most primitive animal on Earth. Before that work Sponges were considered as first animals to branch off from rest of the animals and hence occupied a most basal …

Annual Meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE 2009) will be held in IOWA on the campus of the University of Iowa, from June 3-7, 2009. The theme of the year is “Darwin to the Next Generation”, to commemorate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th publication anniversary of On the Origin of Species. The society also acknowledge both the human creativity and technological innovations that are revolutionizing our understanding of the evolution of genes, genomes and organisms.

Symposium on the “Origin and Evolution of animal genomes” :
Multicellular …

German scientists announced the first rough draft of the genome of our closest relatives, Neanderthals. Leading the team, Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology made this announcement through a video conference to reporters assembled at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The team has successfully decode 3.7 billion bases of of Neandertal DNA from a 38,000-year-old bone of a female Neandertal fossil discovered in Vindija cave in Croatia, which is expected to provide more insights into human evolution.This accounts for …

Want to know any information related to genome sequences ? Then GOLD might be able to solve your every possible problem. It is a comprehensive overview of genome and ESTs projects, both finished and on-going. It harbors currently data on 4434 genome projects covering Archea, Bacteria plus metagenomes and Eukaryotes.
I would like thank Morgane THOMAS-CHOLLIER, Ph.D. from Laboratoire de Bioinformatique des Génomes et Réseaux, Universite Libre de bruxelles (ULB) for writing this article on Hoxful monsters and also for making me aware of this wonderful resource on …

Long wait is finally over ,The draft of the complete genome of the soya bean (Glycine max) has been released by the Joint Genome Institute and its associates at the International Conference on Legume Genomics and Genetics in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Soya bean is pretty popular as crop plant for humans and animal food crop, which is rich in oil and protein.Another important property which makes Soya immensely useful is the its use as a feedstock for bio diesel — in which vegetable oil is chemically modified to power diesel …

Drosophila ,which played a significant role in understanding many complex biological process is well on the way of solving another major puzzle. Species of Drosophila lay eggs outside in the environment , which develops and transforms into first instar larvae in about 24 hours time. UC San Diego biologists have discovered a species from the islands of Seychelles, often lay larvae instead of eggs. Understanding the development of this species might provide us with some clues how animals switch from laying eggs to live birth ? (76)