Two of the groups in our programme (Gabaldón and Guigó) have participated in the analysis of the genomic sequence of the pea aphid Acyrtosiphon pisum, published this week in PLoS Biology. This first published genome of a basal hemimetabolous insect, provides an out-group for comparison with other sequenced insects, and pavesthe way to elucidate molecular mechanisms in

Multiple sequence alignments (MSA) are central to many areas of bioinformatics and evolutionary biology. They are not only used in the phylogenetic analyses of biological sequences but also in many other bioinformatics applications such as homology modeling, database searchers and motif finding. Recently, such multiple sequence alignment based techniques have been incorporated in high-throughput pipelines such as genome annotation and large-scale phylogenetics.