We report here genome sequences and comparative analyses of three closely related parasitoid wasps: Nasonia vitripennis, N. giraulti, and N. longicornis. Parasitoids are important regulators of arthropod populations, including major agricultural pests and disease vectors, and Nasonia is an emerging genetic model, particularly for evolutionary and developmental genetics. Key findings include the identification of a functional DNA methylation tool kit; hymenopteran-specific genes including diverse venoms; lateral gene transfers among Pox viruses, Wolbachia, and Nasonia; and the rapid evolution of genes involved in nuclear-mitochondrial interactions that are implicated in speciation. Newly developed genome resources advance Nasonia for genetic research, accelerate mapping and cloning of quantitative trait loci, and will ultimately provide tools and knowledge for further increasing the utility of parasitoids as pest insect-control agents.

Here we report the genome sequence of the honeybee Apis mellifera, a key model for social behaviour and essential to global ecology through pollination. Compared with other sequenced insect genomes, the A. mellifera genome has high A+T and CpG contents, lacks major transposon families, evolves more slowly, and is more similar to vertebrates for circadian rhythm, RNA interference and DNA methylation genes, among others. Furthermore, A. mellifera has fewer genes for innate immunity, detoxification enzymes, cuticle-forming proteins and gustatory receptors, more genes for odorant receptors, and novel genes for nectar and pollen utilization, consistent with its ecology and social organization. Compared to Drosophila, genes in early developmental pathways differ in Apis, whereas similarities exist for functions that differ markedly, such as sex determination, brain function and behaviour. Population genetics suggests a novel African origin for the species A. mellifera and insights into whether Africanized bees spread throughout the New World via hybridization or displacement.

In addition to maintaining the GenBank(R) nucleic acid sequence database, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides analysis and retrieval resources for the data in GenBank and other biological data available through NCBI's web site. NCBI resources include Entrez, the Entrez Programming Utilities, My NCBI, PubMed, PubMed Central, Entrez Gene, the NCBI Taxonomy Browser, BLAST, BLAST Link, Electronic PCR, OrfFinder, Spidey, Splign, RefSeq, UniGene, HomoloGene, ProtEST, dbMHC, dbSNP, Cancer Chromosomes, Entrez Genome, Genome Project and related tools, the Trace, Assembly, and Short Read Archives, the Map Viewer, Model Maker, Evidence Viewer, Clusters of Orthologous Groups, Influenza Viral Resources, HIV-1/Human Protein Interaction Database, Gene Expression Omnibus, Entrez Probe, GENSAT, Database of Genotype and Phenotype, Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals, the Molecular Modeling Database, the Conserved Domain Database, the Conserved Domain Architecture Retrieval Tool and the PubChem suite of small molecule databases. Augmenting the web applications are custom implementations of the BLAST program optimized to search specialized data sets. These resources can be accessed through the NCBI home page at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

second model, the two main conditions were parametrically modulated by the two categories, respectively (SOM, S5.1). The activation of the precuneus was higher for hard dominance-solvable games than for easy ones ( Fig. 4A and table S10). The activation of the insula was higher for the highly focal coordination games than for less focal ones ( Fig. 4B and table S11). Previous studies also found that precuneus activity increased when the number of planned moves increased (40, 41). The higher demand for memory-related imagery and memory retrieval may explain the greater precuneus activation in hard dominance-solvable games. In highly focal coordination games, the participants may have felt quite strongly that the pool students must notice the same salient feature. This may explain why insula activation correlates with NCI.Participants might have disagreed about which games were difficult. We built a third model to investigate whether the frontoparietal activation correlates with how hard a dominance-solvable game is and whether the activation in insula and ACC correlates with how easy a coordination game is. Here, the two main conditions were parametrically modulated by each participant's probability of obtaining a reward in each game (SOM, S2.2 and S5.2). We found a negative correlation between the activation of the precuneus and the participant's probability of obtaining a reward in dominance-solvable games ( Fig. 4C and table S12), which suggests that dominance-solvable games that yielded lower payoffs presented harder mental challenges. In a previous study on working memory, precuneus activity positively correlated with response times, a measure of mental effort (24). Both findings are consistent with the interpretation that subjective measures reflecting harder tasks (higher efforts) correlate with activation in precuneus. A positive correlation between insula activation and the participant's probability of obtaining a reward again suggests that coordination games with a highly salient feature strongly activated the "gut feeling" reported by many participants (Fig. 4D and table S13). A previous study found that the subjective rating of "chills intensity" in music correlates with activation of insula (42). Both findings are consistent with the interpretation that the subjective intensity of how salient a stimulus is correlates with activation in insula.As mentioned, choices were made significantly faster in coordination games than in dominancesolvable games. The results of the second and third models provide additional support for the idea that intuitive and deliberative mental processes have quite different properties. The "slow and effortful" process was more heavily taxed when the dominance-solvable games were harder. The "fast and effortless" process was more strongly activated when coordination was easy.