Botany: Growing flowers

T . Barkman , M . Bendiksby , S . Lim , K . Salleh , J . Nais , D . Madulid , T . Schumacher. 2008. Accelerated Rates of Floral Evolution at the Upper Size Limit for Flowers. Current Biology 18: 1508 - 1513.

The world's largest flowers, of the Southeast Asian Rafflesia genus, which mimic the smell and appearance of rotting flesh, evolved much more quickly and more often than botanists expected.

Todd Barkman of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and his team hypothesized that it would have taken a long time for the Rafflesia flowers to evolve from their smaller ancestors to their current maximum size of one metre in diameter because of the many structural and physiological changes required to support such large flowers. To their surprise, they found that the flowers of some Rafflesia species have more or less doubled in size during the past one million to two million years. As Barkman points out, it is hard to imagine a giraffe doubling the length of its neck in the same time frame. The scientists suggest that even bigger flowers could evolve in future.

Fuente de la información: Research Highlights, Nature 455, 1010 (23 October 2008) | doi:10.1038/4551010a; Published online 22 October 2008.

Bosque: integrated phylogenetic analysis software

Ramírez-Flandes S. & O. Ulloa (2008).
Bosque: Integrated phylogenetic analysis software.
Bioinformatics 24(21):2539-2541;
doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btn466

Summary:
Phylogenetic analyses today involve dealing with computer files in different formats and often several computer programs. Although some widely used applications have integrated important functionalities for such analyses, they still work with local resources only: input/output files (users have to manage them) and local computing (users have sometimes to leave their programs, on their desktop computers, running for extended periods of time). To address these problems we have developed ‘Bosque’, a multi-platform client–server software that performs standard phylogenetic tasks either locally or remotely on servers, and integrates the results on a local relational database. Bosque performs sequence alignments and graphical visualization and editing of trees, thus providing a powerful environment that integrates all the steps of phylogenetic analyses.

Availability: http://bosque.udec.cl

Contact: sram@profc.udec.cl

Filogenética en la lingüistica

The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database: from bioinformatics to lexomics
Simon J. Greenhill, Robert Blust and Russell D. Gray
Publication Date: 15 Oct 2008
Evolutionary Bioinformatics 2008:4

Abstract

Phylogenetic methods have revolutionised evolutionary biology and have recently been applied to studies of linguistic and cultural evolution. However, the basic comparative data on the languages of the world required for these analyses is often widely dispersed in hard to obtain sources. Here we outline how our Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database (ABVD) helps remedy this situation by collating wordlists from over 500 languages into one web-accessible database. We describe the technology underlying the ABVD and discuss the benefits that an evolutionary bioinformatic approach can provide. These include facilitating computational comparative linguistic research, answering questions about human prehistory, enabling syntheses with genetic data, and safe-guarding fragile linguistic information.