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Evolution Highway was a collaborative project to provide a visual means for simultaneously comparing mammalian genomes of humans, horses, cats, dogs, pigs, cattle, rats, and mice. The tool removes the burden of manually aligning these maps and allows cognitive skills to be used on something more valuable than preparation and transformation of data. Primary Researcher Dr. Harris A. Lewin explains that with Evolution Highway one is able to look " . . . at the whole genome at once--multiple chromosomes across multiple species. The insights wouldn't have come so quickly if we couldn't throw the data at this tool from NCSA.”
The Tool
Evolution Highway was developed to visualize the results of the mammalian genome comparative analysis. It is a set of D2K components created to load, correlate and map chromosome and species data to a visual chromosome metaphor for comparative analysis. It employs a zoomable user interface that allows the user to zoom in for detailed information and zoom out for an overview. The D2K framework enables Evolution Highway to be a a web service application and a desktop application. The D2K Web Service application can be launched from the button located at the top right side of this page. The desktop application can be downloaded under an academic license. Click the Download link for instructions.
Evolution Highway offers several simple, user-oriented features that make examining the comparative maps easier. Users can look at multiple species at once, hide a given species with a click, and zoom in and out of the comparative maps, which can cover millions of base pairs.
The Research
An international team of scientists provided the comparative data that is displayed in the Evolution Highway tool. The research team was led by Dr. Harris A. Lewin of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and Dr. William J. Murphy of Texas A&M University.
The team collected genetic maps and whole-genome sequences of the species which provided the detail of which genes are on which chromosomes. The comparative data was loaded into the Evolution Highway tool.
This team discovered that breakages in chromosomes in mammalian evolution have occurred at preferred rather than random sites and many of these sites are correlated in human cancers.
This research is reported in Science on July 22, 2005.
Above: A view of Evolution Highway showing human reference chromosomes 1-5 as well as the reconstructed Murid rodent ancestor overlay.