Comparative genomics research benefits from NCSA data analysis and visualization tools--and lands a paper in Science.

"There's been about 94 million years of evolution since cattle and primates diverged from a common ancestor, so it doesn't take a doctor to recognize the difference," says Harris Lewin, director of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Institute for Genomic Biology and a professor of immunogenetics. It does, however, take a lot of work and specialized tools to relate species' genomes to one another and to uncover the finer points of distinction and similarity.

Lewin's team at the U of I recently published the most extensive comparison of mammalian genomes ever created--looking at the chromosome organization of humans, cattle, rats, mice, cats, dogs, horses, and pigs, all at once. They collaborated with researchers at Texas A&M University, the Genome Institute of Singapore, the National Cancer Institute, the University of California at San Diego, and other institutions. Results, presented in a wide-ranging Science article in July 2005, showed that the historical rate of chromosome evolution in mammals was different than previously thought. They also revealed provocative new features of chromosome breakpoints in evolution and cancer.

The comparisons relied on Evolution Highway, data visualization and analysis software built for the team by NCSA. It is based on NCSA's application-development environment for data mining called D2K.

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