DAMBE (data analysis in molecular biology and evolution) is an integrated software package for converting, manipulating, statistically and graphically describing, and analyzing molecular sequence data with a user-friendly Windows 95/98/2000/NT interface. DAMBE is free and can be downloaded from http://web.hku.hk/~xxia/software/software.htm. The current version is 4.0.36.

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Since its first release in 2001 as mainly a software package for phylogenetic analysis, data analysis for molecular biology and evolution (DAMBE) has gained many new functions that may be classified into six categories: 1) sequence retrieval, editing, manipulation, and conversion among more than 20 standard sequence formats including MEGA, NEXUS, PHYLIP, GenBank, and the new NeXML format for interoperability, 2) motif characterization and discovery functions such as position weight matrix and Gibbs sampler, 3) descriptive genomic analysis tools with improved versions of codon adaptation index, effective number of codons, protein isoelectric point profiling, RNA and protein secondary structure prediction and calculation of minimum folding energy, and genomic skew plots with optimized window size, 4) molecular phylogenetics including sequence alignment, testing substitution saturation, distance-based, maximum parsimony, and maximum-likelihood methods for tree reconstructions, testing the molecular clock hypothesis with either a phylogeny or with relative-rate tests, dating gene duplication and speciation events, choosing the best-fit substitution models, and estimating rate heterogeneity over sites, 5) phylogeny-based comparative methods for continuous and discrete variables, and 6) graphic functions including secondary structure display, optimized skew plot, hydrophobicity plot, and many other plots of amino acid properties along a protein sequence, tree display and drawing by dragging nodes to each other, and visual searching of the maximum parsimony tree. DAMBE features a graphic, user-friendly, and intuitive interface and is freely available from http://dambe.bio.uottawa.ca (last accessed April 16, 2013).

DAMBE is a comprehensive software package for genomic and phylogenetic data analysis on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh computers. New functions include imputing missing distances and phylogeny simultaneously (paving the way to build large phage and transposon trees), new bootstrapping/jackknifing methods for PhyPA (phylogenetics from pairwise alignments), and an improved function for fast and accurate estimation of the shape parameter of the gamma distribution for fitting rate heterogeneity over sites. Previous method corrects multiple hits for each site independently. DAMBE’s new method uses all sites simultaneously for correction. DAMBE, featuring a user-friendly graphic interface, is freely available from http://dambe.bio.uottawa.ca (last accessed, April 17, 2018).

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The spike protein in SARS-CoV-2 (SARS-2-S) interacts with the human ACE2 receptor to gain entry into a cell to initiate infection. Both Pfizer/BioNTech’s BNT162b2 and Moderna’s mRNA-1273 vaccine candidates are based on stabilized mRNA encoding prefusion SARS-2-S that can be produced after the mRNA is delivered into the human cell and translated. SARS-2-S is cleaved into S1 and S2 subunits, with S1 serving the function of receptor-binding and S2 serving the function of membrane fusion. Here, I dissect in detail the various domains of SARS-2-S and their functions discovered through a variety of different experimental and theoretical approaches to build a foundation for a comprehensive mechanistic understanding of how SARS-2-S works to achieve its function of mediating cell entry and subsequent cell-to-cell transmission. The integration of structure and function of SARS-2-S in this review should enhance our understanding of the dynamic processes involving receptor binding, multiple cleavage events, membrane fusion, viral entry, as well as the emergence of new viral variants. I highlighted the relevance of structural domains and dynamics to vaccine development, and discussed reasons for the spike protein to be frequently featured in the conspiracy theory claiming that SARS-CoV-2 is artificially created.

DAMBE is a comprehensive software workbench for data analysis in molecular biology, phylogenetics, and evolution. Several important new functions have been added since version 5 of DAMBE: 1) comprehensive genomic profiling of translation initiation efficiency of different genes in different prokaryotic species, 2) a new index of translation elongation (ITE) that takes into account both tRNA-mediated selection and background mutation on codon–anticodon adaptation, 3) a new and accurate phylogenetic approach based on pairwise alignment only, which is useful for highly divergent sequences from which a reliable multiple sequence alignment is difficult to obtain. Many other functions have been updated and improved including PWM for motif characterization, Gibbs sampler for de novo motif discovery, hidden Markov models for protein secondary structure prediction, self-organizing map for nonlinear clustering of transcriptomic data, comprehensive sequence alignment, and phylogenetic functions. DAMBE features a graphic, user-friendly and intuitive interface, and is freely available from .

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