#34 · Tools & infrastructure

Comparative evolution resources trace GPCR conservation and GABAergic system assembly

The three items share a comparative, evolution-oriented framing: each provides a resource or assembly model for tracing molecular and cellular features across lineages. The GABAergic study addresses how the principal inhibitory signaling machinery of bilaterian nervous systems was assembled, with a stepwise shift from metabolic to messaging roles as its central proposition. The GPCR Evolution Database offers a curated, open-access substrate for such analyses, supplying ortholog sets, alignments, phylogenetic trees and per-residue conservation scores for more than 800 human GPCRs. The dog brain single-nucleus atlas extends this comparative logic to cell-type resolution, profiling roughly 60,000 cells across cerebellum, thalamus and cerebral regions and benchmarking against human and mouse. The shared contribution is the pairing of deep phylogenetic reconstruction with resources that make residue-level and cell-level diversity directly queryable.