© 2015 Nayfach and Pollard; licensee BioMed Central.Average genome size is an important, yet often overlooked, property of microbial communities. We developed MicrobeCensus to rapidly and accurately estimate average genome size from shotgun metagenomic dat

© 2015 Avila-Herrera and Pollard. Background: When biomolecules physically interact, natural selection operates on them jointly. Contacting positions in protein and RNA structures exhibit correlated patterns of sequence evolution due to constraints imposed

© 2015 WILEY Periodicals, Inc.The recent finding that the human version of a neurodevelopmental enhancer of the Wnt receptor Frizzled 8 (FZD8) gene alters neural progenitor cell cycle timing and brain size is a step forward to understanding human brain evo

Background: Sequence-based phylogenetic trees are a well-established tool for characterizing diversity of both macroorganisms and microorganisms. Phylogenetic methods have recently been applied to shotgun metagenomic data from microbial communities, partic

© 2015 The Author.Summary: Microbiome researchers frequently want to know how abundant a particular microbial gene or pathway is across different human hosts, including its association with disease and its cooccurrence with other genes or microbial taxa. W

Obesity is an important and intractable public health problem. In addition to the well-known risk factors of behavior, diet, and genetics, gut microbial communities were recently identified as another possible source of risk and a potential therapeutic tar

The evolutionary history of a protein reflects the functional history of its ancestors. Recent phylogenetic studies identified distinct evolutionary signatures that characterize proteins involved in cancer, Mendelian disease, and different ontogenic stages

© 2015, The Author(s).Regulatory elements are more evolutionarily conserved and provide a larger mutational target than coding regions of the human genome, suggesting that mutations in non-coding regions contribute significantly to development and disease.

The genetic changes underlying the dramatic differences in form and function between humans and other primates are largely unknown, although it is clear that gene regulatory changes play an important role. To identify regulatory sequences with potentially