Transfer of knowledge from model organisms to evolutionarily distant non-model organisms: The coral Pocillopora damicornis membrane signaling receptome

Bridge: A New Algorithm for Rooting Orthologous Genes in Large-Scale Evolutionary Analyses

Orthology information has been used for searching patterns in high-dimensional data, allowing transferring functional information between species. The key concept behind this strategy is that orthologous genes share ancestry to some extent. While reconstructing the history of a single gene is feasible with the existing computational resources, the reconstruction of entire biological systems remains challenging. In this study, we present Bridge, a new algorithm designed to infer the evolutionary root of orthologous genes in large-scale evolutionary analyses. The Bridge algorithm infers the evolutionary root of a given gene based on the distribution of its orthologs in a species tree. The Bridge algorithm is implemented in R and can be used either to assess genetic changes across the evolutionary history of orthologous groups or to infer the onset of specific traits in a biological system.

Insulin signaling and pharmacology in humans and in corals

Once thought to be a unique capability of the Langerhans islets in the pancreas of mammals, insulin (INS) signaling is now recognized as an evolutionarily ancient function going back to prokaryotes. INS is ubiquitously present not only in humans but also in unicellular eukaryotes, fungi, worms, and Drosophila. Remote homologue identification also supports the presence of INS and INS receptor in corals where the availability of glucose is largely dependent on the photosynthetic activity of the symbiotic algae. The cnidarian animal host of corals operates together with a 20,000-sized microbiome, in direct analogy to the human gut microbiome. In humans, aberrant INS signaling is the hallmark of metabolic disease, and is thought to play a major role in aging, and age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease. We here would like to argue that a broader view of INS beyond its human homeostasis function may help us understand other organisms, and in turn, studying those non-model organisms may enable a novel view of the human INS signaling system. To this end, we here review INS signaling from a new angle, by drawing analogies between humans and corals at the molecular level.

Gobind's last graduate student

Written on the occasion of his 100th birthday, this is a personal account of my time as a graduate student with Nobel laureate, H. Gobind Khorana, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1996 to 2000.