Gustavo Caetano-Anolles

A new analysis supports the hypothesis that viruses are living entities that share a long evolutionary history with cells, researchers report. The study offers the first reliable method for tracing viral evolution back to a time when neither viruses nor cells existed in the forms recognized today, the researchers say.

The new findings appear in the journal Science Advances.

IGB Faculty Members Granted Access to Top Supercomputer

Four researchers at the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) have been granted access to the Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, capable of sustained performance at 1 petaflop, the measure of computer processing speed that is equal to a thousand trillion floating-point operations per second.