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Four goldfish Carassius auratus morphotypes of similar length (50 mm): common (streamlined, full complement of paired and median fins, bifurcated caudal fin), comet ('common like' but with a long, deeply forked caudal fin), fantail (short, deep body with twinned caudal and anal fins) and eggfish (similar to the fantail but lacking a dorsal fin) were compared. Drag, steady swimming kinematics, energetics, fast-start performance, stability in yaw and roll and propulsive muscle ultrastructural characteristics were measured. A performance 'pairing' (common and comet; fantail and eggfish) was a recurrent theme for most performance variables. Fantail and eggfish drag were higher (requiring more thrust at any given velocity) than those for the more streamlined common and comet. This was reflected in kinematics; tailbeat frequency and stride length at any given velocity for the common and comet were lower and higher, respectively, than that of the fantail and eggfish. Common and comet fatigue times were not significantly different from those of their ancestor, crucian carp Carassius carassius, and higher than the fantail and eggfish. The cost of transport of the common and comet (c. 0. 6 mg O(2) kg(-1) m(-1)) was accurately predicted by the mass scaling relationship for fish, but values for the fantail and eggfish (c. 1. 3 mg O(2) kg(-1) m(-1)) were not. Rolling and yawing motions in eggfish (dorsal fin absent) during steady swimming were associated with significant energy losses. Eggfish maximum fast-start acceleration (c. 5 m s(-2)) was poor due to the absence of inertial and lifting contributions to thrust from the dorsal fin and energy wasting rolling motions. Common and comet fast-start performance (average velocity c. 0. 45 m s(-1), maximum velocity c. 1. 2 m s(-1), average acceleration c. 7. 5 m s(-2), maximum acceleration c. 35 m s(-2)) was similar to that of other locomotor generalists (e.g. rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss). Artificially selected fishes can contribute to the understanding of form and movement in fishes and complement studies of the role of locomotor adaptations in natural systems.

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R-loops are three-stranded nucleic acid structures formed from the hybridization of RNA and DNA during nascent transcription. In 2012, Ginno et al. introduced the first R-loop mapping method, DNA:RNA immunoprecipitation (DRIP) sequencing. Since that time, dozens of studies have implemented R-loop mapping and new high-resolution techniques have been developed. The resulting datasets have tremendous potential to reveal the causes and consequences of R-loops genome-wide. However, poor quality and variability between mapping approaches pose serious barriers to the meta-analysis of these data. In our recent work, we reprocessed 693 R-loop mapping samples, devising new quality methods, defining a set of high-confidence mapping samples, and then deriving R-loop regions, consensus sites of R-loop formation. This analysis yielded the largest R-loop data resource to date along with novel computational approaches for R-loop mapping analysis. Now, we introduce RLBase, an innovative web server which builds upon those data and software by providing users with the capability to (1) explore hundreds of public R-loop mapping datasets, (2) explore consensus R-loop regions, (3) analyze user-supplied datasets to generate an HTML quality report, and (4) download all the processed data for the 693 samples we previously reprocessed and standardized. In addition to RLBase, we also describe the other software which, along with RLBase, provides a computational framework for R-loop bioinformatics. RLBase, and the rest of these software (termed “RLSuite”), are provided freely under an MIT license and made publicly available: https://gccri.bishop-lab.uthscsa.edu/rlsuite/. RLBase is directly accessible via the following URL: https://gccri.bishop-lab.uthscsa.edu/rlbase/.