We have recently started building our own artificial framework to mimic biological evolution. In our framework, every Digital Organism (DO) has its own genome, which has been inspired by the model previously proposed by Reil (1999) and consists of a randomly created string of digits. Genes are not pre-specified, but identified in the randomly built genome. Compared to the initial model of Reil, our model makes an explicit distinction between regulatory and structural genes. Upon initialization of a new DO, specific genes will be activated, dependent on certain cues of the environment.

Seagrasses colonized the sea on at least three independent occasions to form the basis of one of the most productive and widespread coastal ecosystems on the planet. Here we report the genome of Zostera marina (L.), the first, to our knowledge, marine angiosperm to be fully sequenced. This reveals unique insights into the genomic losses and gains involved in achieving the structural and physiological adaptations required for its marine lifestyle, arguably the most severe habitat shift ever accomplished by flowering plants.

ORCAE - AOCC

The AOCC aims to sequence the genomes of more than 100 African neglected or under utilized crops, as well as to resequence hundred lines for each species. We aim to make these reference genomes available through our online genome annotation system ORCAE at http://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/orcae/aocc