homology

According to Julia Clarke, a professor at UT's Jackson School of Geosciences, this genetic connection between the vocal organs is an exciting new example of "deep homology," a term that describes how different tissues or organs can share a common genetic link.

However, homology between trunk somites and such head segments has been controversial.

Co-author Roberto Hofmann noticed that, in addition to the red-green sensing domain, CcaS had a domain with homology to blue-light photosensors called phototropins.

Mathematician Jose Perea of Northeastern University and a team of computational biologists used persistent homology to find periodic biological processes—those that repeat at regular intervals.

After using some standard techniques to simplify the data, the team computed the persistent homology of the system by connecting the data points at different scales and examining the resulting simplicial complexes.