Agriculture AwardManoa’s Bernard Kratky honored for his study on growing lettuce hydroponically. Read more
Political Science Distance LearningWest O‘ahu offers online political science concentration. Read more
UH People in PrintHilo’s Nina Buchanan, Robert Fox, Yoshitaka Miike, Marianne Takamiya, Sandra Wagner-Wright and Jing Yin and Manoa’s Kim Bridges, Hai Fu, Qing Xiao Li, Will McClatchey, Susan Kee-Young Park, Harold Richins and Alan Stockton. Read moreGlobal Responsibility for FoodManoa's George Kent edits Global Obligations for the Right to Food. Read moreNew AppointmentsJohn Hashimoto named System's director of risk management and Timothy Moore named director of Hilo’s Student Life Center. Read more
UH EventsMaui’s Sustainable Earth Celebration, Leeward’s Leeward CC Guitars concert and Manoa’s After This Our Exile screening and more. Read more
Animal Evolution
An international team of scientists led by researchers at Manoa Pacific Biosciences Research Center’s Kewalo Marine Lab has made significant new progress on understanding the patterns of animal evolution. The study was published in Nature.
Over a four-year span, a team of experts collected data from a wide array of animals, doubling the number of different animal groups ever sampled. The team collected the most commonly expressed genes from each species and compared them using complex computer bioinformatic and phylogenetic programs to determine which species were more closely related to one another.
“The analysis of these data were computationally intensive, requiring banks of dozens of computers running in parallel simultaneously over months of time to complete a single run,” says Professor Mark Martindale. The results showed strong support for many well agreed upon nodes, but also showed many new relationships that had never been proposed.
“These results show that morphological complexity is not correlated in simple ways with molecular complexity, that many developmental and morphological patterns were lost or secondarily simplified in some lineages, and that some features such as body segmentation and musculature evolved multiple times throughout evolutionary time,” says Martindale.
UH authors include Martindale, Casey W. Dunn, Andreas Hejnol, David Q. Matus, Kevin Pang, William E. Browne and Elaine Seaver.