Update the database to include approx. 40 species

More than a year after the last update, I have updated all the databases to incorporate Ensembl release 93 and gene models of quite a few species with emerging genome-wide sequence data. The species newly introduced have been marked with a red asterisk ('*') in the species list in this page.

Particularly, I am delighted to announce that they now include three elasmobranch shark species, brownbanded bamboo shark, cloudy catshark, and whale shark, whose genome assemblies and gene models were produced in my lab in Kobe (see our original paper published online today in Nature Ecology and Evolution).

I have also included gene models of the Madagascar ground gecko Paroedura picta for which my lab performed de novo genome sequecing and gene prediction (see our original paper published earlier this year in BMC Biology).

Shigehiro Kuraku

A minor update - whole elephant shark genome

I have replaced the set of elephant shark peptides with the one based on the whole genome assembly recently published by the group in Singapore (Venkatesh et al., 2014).

The species ID has not changed ('CALMI').

This is the only representative of the group Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fish) at the moment.

aLeaves Introduction on Scribd (in Japanese)

I have uploaded a draft of the article introducing aLeaves in Japanese onto Scribd.

This article will be a part of the next issue of the newsletter of Japanese Society of Evolutionary Studies.

aLeaves paper now available

An article introducing aLeaves and its link with the MAFFT server has been made available online just a few days ago.


This article will be a part of the Web Server Issue 2013 of Nucleic Acids Research.

Citation details:
aLeaves facilitates on-demand exploration of metazoan gene family trees on MAFFT sequence alignment server with enhanced interactivity
Shigehiro Kuraku, Christian M. Zmasek, Osamu Nishimura and Kazutaka Katoh
Nucleic Acids Research. Web Server Issue 2013, in press.