Caroline M. Weisman

The paper identifies 'tinkering loci' in Drosophila genomes that accelerate gene birth by concentrating duplicated gene fragments and facilitating composite gene creation.

The paper identifies exon shuffling hotspots in Drosophila affinis genomes, showing they facilitate rapid gene creation and family formation through genomic sequence rearrangement.

WormCat 2.0 identifies poorly annotated genes in C. elegans and shows they have human orthologs with limited annotation.

The paper shows that using different gene annotation methods in comparative genomics can falsely increase the number of lineage-specific genes by up to 15-fold.