The ants go marching one by one, hurrah!

The Isthmus of Panama, that thin ribbon of land connecting the Americas, has served as a gateway for species migration between the continents since its formation in a distant epoch. But the timing of its emergence from the sea has been unclear, with the current best guess set at 3 million years ago. Now, a genomic study of army ants is pushing back the date of closure by millions of year. Army ants found strictly in Central America diverged from their South American sister lineages between 4 million and 7 million years ago, according to biologists from Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago. Their study, published in Molecular Ecology in October 2016, used genomic sequencing to determine that three of the lineage pairs in Costa Rica and Nicaragua show no evidence of gene flow, suggesting at least two waves of army ant dispersal into Central America separated by millions of years. The research team chose army ants for the study because the winglessness of their queens restricts their colonization of new territory to land. As evidence, the investigators point to the fact that while army ants are ubiquitous on the mainland, they are completely absent from all Caribbean islands. Understanding the unique biological niche and life cycle of army ants allowed the scientists to control for the possibility of aerial and aquatic dispersal to Central America. “What I love about the study is that we were able to leverage the unique biology of the organisms to address a question about the history of Earth,” lead author Max Winston, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, stated in an accompanying news release by The Field Museum. —Karyn Hede, News Editor

The race to create software tools for genomics heats up

No fewer than four well-funded competitors recently announced initiatives to create tools that they hope will power genomic analysis for the decades ahead. In October 2016 alone, three major initiatives announced public launches. IBM Watson for Genomics is touted as a service that will combine artificial intelligence capabilities with genomic tumor sequencing to determine the best course of treatment for cancer patients. IBM Watson Health and Quest Diagnostics estimated that the service will be available for “thousands of oncologists who provide about 70% of cancer care in the nation.” Meanwhile, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard are teaming with software giant Microsoft to lift genome sequencing into the cloud. The Broad’s Genome Analysis Toolkit is already being used in genomic analysis, but Microsoft worked with the Broad to upload the toolkit to its Azure cloud platform to expand its reach. The University of Pittsburgh chose a traditional academic publication in Plos One to announce its open-source software package, called TCGA Expedition, designed to probe The Cancer Genome Atlas Project (TCGA)’s 1.2 petabytes of data, including whole-genome sequencing, whole-exome sequencing, methylation, RNA expression, proteomic, and clinical data sets. Addressing the problem of big data, the joint Department of Energy–National Cancer Institute project called Collaborative Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer will design software for exascale computing, a computing architecture that is currently only on drawing boards. It’s unclear which, if any, of these will deliver on their promises, but the competition is likely to remain intense for some time. —Karyn Hede, News Editor