Title:  Exploring Evolutionary Constraints of Genomic Features

Abstract: Recent advances in technologies for genome sequencing have enabled the generation of valuable data to study changes in genome structural organisation that occur during evolution. The integration of genome sequence and gene annotation now allows extensive trans-taxa comparative genomics approaches in order to understand a wide range of evolutionary constraints involved in determining genome organisation. The Ensembl genome browser site contains chromosome-level genome assemblies, associated annotations, and other information for over 1,500 eukaryotic genomes. The rapid increase in the availability of whole-genome assemblies managed within a generic data schema provides the opportunity to explore fundamental evolutionary questions related to genomic or genic features. Although many online tools and genome browsers have been developed with different underlying genome databases (e.g. Ensembl Core database), less attention has been paid to the interactive exploration of more fundamental evolutionary questions related to genome structure and organisation. With the modification of the existing Ensembl Core database schema and development of associated pre-processing and analysis pipelines, the proposed Heuristic Ensembl Meta-Analysis (HEMA) system provides a platform for generating unique queries relating to genome-wide features and sequence-derived properties. Also, it allows genomic researchers to carry out more sophisticated sequence analysis between any taxa within the Ensembl system, which may reveal potential genomic signals imposed by selection pressure.