Haplotype assembly and viral quasispecies reconstruction are challenging tasks concerned with analysis of genomic mixtures using sequencing data.

Environment Animals Wildlife 14,000-year-old woolly rhinoceros DNA extracted from wolf's stomach The two-horned prehistoric mammal went extinct about 8,700 years ago. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Towards the end of the last ice age, an ancient wolf feasted on a young woolly rhinoceros (). When the wolf died, it ended up buried in Siberian permafrost for about 14,000 years until it was uncovered by paleontologists in 2015. Luckily for scientists, some woolly rhinoceros tissue remained inside of the wolf's stomach.

Science sleuths think they found Leonardo da Vinci's DNA Advances in genetics might help us see what set the Renaissance man apart. The painting hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Scientists are one step closer to pinpointing fragments of Leonardo da Vinci's elusive DNA . A team of researchers from the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project analyzed samples swabbed from a red chalk drawing possibly attributed to the famed polymath, as well as letters written by one of his known cousins.

Similar to natural language models, researchers have proposed foundation models in genomics to learn generalizable features from unlabeled genome data that can then be fine-tuned for downstream tasks such as identifying regulatory elements. Due to the quadratic scaling of attention, previous Transformer-based genomic models have used 512 to 4k tokens as context (<0.001% of the human genome), significantly limiting the modeling of long-range interactions in DNA. In addition, these methods rely on tokenizers or fixed k-mers to aggregate meaningful DNA units, losing single nucleotide resolution (i.e. DNA characters) where subtle genetic variations can completely alter protein function via single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Recently, Hyena, a large language model based on implicit convolutions was shown to match attention in quality while allowing longer context lengths and lower time complexity.

Although wolf-canine interbreeding has been considered extremely rare, the latest research shows that many present-day canines carry a small amount of wolf genes. A surprising study reveals that there is a trace of wolf lurking within the tiny body of a Chihuahua and the gigantic build of a St. Bernard. An international research team from the American Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of Natural History analyzed the genomes of 2,693 dogs and wolves and found that 64.1 percent of purebred dogs carry fragments of wolf DNA. Furthermore, a study of village dogs (free-roaming dogs living in or near human communities) from around the world found genetic traces of wolves in all 280 analyzed pups. Dogs are thought to have evolved from populations of gray wolves, which became extinct during the Late Pleistocene epoch about 20,000 years ago.

While crossover is a critical and often indispensable component in other forms of Genetic Programming, such as Linear- and Tree-based, it has consistently been claimed that it deteriorates search performance in CGP. As a result, a mutation-alone $(1+λ)$ evolutionary strategy has become the canonical approach for CGP. Although several operators have been developed that demonstrate an increased performance over the canonical method, a general solution to the problem is still lacking. In this paper, we compare basic crossover methods, namely one-point and uniform, to variants in which nodes are ``preserved,'' including the subgraph crossover developed by Roman Kalkreuth, the difference being that when ``node preservation'' is active, crossover is not allowed to break apart instructions. We also compare a node mutation operator to the traditional point mutation; the former simply replaces an entire node with a new one. We find that node preservation in both mutation and crossover improves search using symbolic regression benchmark problems, moving the field towards a general solution to CGP crossover.

Chihuahuas have about 0.2 percent wolf ancestry, according to a new study. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. While that chihuahua might seem about as similar to a wolf as a shrub is to a mighty redwood tree, some small breeds like the tiny, big-eared chihuahua have some wolf ancestry. New research published today in the journal (), finds that the majority of dogs living today have low but detectable levels of post-domestication wolf ancestry. These genes have likely helped shape multiple characteristics, including personality traits, sense of smell, and body size.

Several algorithms build on the perfect phylogeny model to infer evolutionary trees.

Several algorithms build on the perfect phylogeny model to infer evolutionary trees.