Genome scientists' paths diverge

Plant scientists celebrate new woody plant genome.

Our friends often remind us that scientists are strange beasts. As such, it is fitting that we should rejoice at the release of a major new genome by further scholarship and analysis – using the genome to unravel new elements of plant physiology and evolution. In this Feature Issue we celebrate the completion of the genome of Eucalyptus grandis (Myburg et al., 2014), the first representative of...

Two mast cell roads diverge

Sarcoidosis is a mysterious, long-recognized disease characterized by the formation of tuberculosis-like granulomas in the lungs. The mystery of sarcoidosis stems from both its unknown etiology and its paradoxical effects on the immune system. The disease has been attributed to a hyperactivation of CD4 T helper type 1 cells that infiltrate the lungs but, in patients with sarcoidosis, these very...

Minimal entropy probability paths between genome families.

We develop a metric for probability distributions with applications to biological sequence analysis. Our distance metric is obtained by minimizing a functional defined on the class of paths over probability measures on N categories. The underlying mathematical theory is connected to a constrained problem in the calculus of variations. The solution presented is a numerical solution, which approx...

Commentary When developmental pathways diverge

We think of development as a process of inexorable progressive change by which a single cell is transformed into a complex multicellular organism, made up of many tissues and organs, each with a distinctive structure and function. In any given species, the progression from the simple to the complex occurs in an orderly fashion that is repeated with little or no variation in millions of individu...

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