Among vertebrates, turtles have many unique characteristics providing biologists with opportunities to study novel evolutionary innovations and processes. We present here a high quality, partially phased, and chromosome level Red-Eared Slider (Trachemys scripta elegans, TSE) genome as a reference for future research on turtle and tetrapod evolution. This TSE assembly is 2.269 Gb in length, has one of the highest scaffold N50 and N90 values of any published turtle genome to date (N50=129.68 Mb and N90=19 Mb) and has a total of 28,415 annotated genes. We introduce synteny analyses using BUSCO single copy orthologs (SCOs), which reveal two chromosome fusion events accounting for differences in chromosome counts between emydids and other cryptodire turtles and reveal many fission/fusion events for birds, crocodiles, and snakes relative to TSE. This annotated chromosome level genome will provide an important reference genome for future studies on turtle evolution and other biological and climate questions. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.MOTIVATION Epistasis reflects the distortion on a particular trait or phenotype resulting from the combinatorial effect of two or more genes or genetic variants. Epistasis is an important genetic foundation underlying quantitative traits in many organisms as well as in complex human diseases. However, there are two major barriers in identifying epistasis using large genomic data sets. One is that epistasis analysis will induce over-fitting of an over-saturated model with the high-dimensionality of a genomic dataset. Therefore, the problem of identifying epistasis demands efficient statistical methods. The second barrier comes from the intensive computing time for epistasis analysis, even when the appropriate model and data are specified. RESULTS In this study, we combine statistical techniques and computational techniques to scale up epistasis analysis using empirical Bayesian Elastic Net (EBEN) models. Specifically, we first apply a matrix manipulation strategy for pre-computing the correlation matrix and pre-filter to narrow down the search space for epistasis analysis. We then develop a parallelized approach to further accelerate the modeling process. Our experiments on synthetic and empirical genomic data demonstrate that our parallelized methods offer tens of fold speed-up in comparison with the classical EBEN method which runs in a sequential manner. We applied our parallelized approach to a yeast dataset, and we were able to identify both main and epistatic effects of genetic variants associated with traits such as fitness. AVAILABILITY The software is available at github.com/shilab/parEBEN. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. © The Author(s) (2020). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email journals.permissions@oup.com.Elongate, snake- or eel-like, body forms have evolved convergently many times in most major lineages of vertebrates. Despite studies of various clades with elongate species, we still lack an understanding of their evolutionary dynamics and distribution on the vertebrate tree of life. We also do not know whether this convergence in body form coincides with convergence at other biological levels. Here, we present the first craniate-wide analysis of how many times elongate body forms have evolved, as well as rates of its evolution and reversion to a non-elongate form. We then focus on five convergently elongate squamate species and test if they converged in vertebral number and shape, as well as their locomotor performance and kinematics. We compared each elongate species to closely related quadrupedal species and determined whether the direction of vertebral or locomotor change matched in each case. The five lineages examined are obscure species from remote locations, providing a valuable glimpse into their biology. They are the skink lizards Brachymeles lukbani, Lerista praepedita, and Isopachys anguinoides, the basal squamate Dibamus novaeguineae, and the basal snake Malayotyphlops cf. ruficaudus. Our results support convergence among these species in the number of trunk and caudal vertebrae, but not vertebral shape. We also find that the elongate species are relatively slower than their limbed counterparts and move with lower frequency and higher amplitude body undulations, with the exception of Isopachys. This is among the first evidence of locomotor convergence across distantly related, elongate species. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. All rights reserved. For permissions please email journals.permissions@oup.com.MOTIVATION Recently, multi-objective swarm intelligence optimization (SIO) algorithms have attracted considerable attention as disease model-free methods for detecting high-order single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) interactions. However, a strict Pareto optimal set may filter out some of the SNP combinations associated with disease status. Furthermore, the lack of heuristic factors for finding SNP interactions and the preference for discrimination approaches to disease models are considerable challenges for SIO. METHOD In this study, we propose a multi-population harmony search (HS) algorithm dedicated to the detection of high-order SNP interactions (MP-HS-DHSI). This method consists of three stages. In the 1st stage, HS with multi-population (multi-harmony memories) is used to discover a set of candidate high-order SNP combinations having an association with disease status. In HS, multiple criteria (Bayesian network-based K2-score, Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence, likelihood ratio (LR) and normalized distancy Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email journals.permissions@oup.com.Cardiomyocytes express a surprisingly large number of potassium channel types.  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/wnt-c59-c59.html  The primary physiological functions of the currents conducted by these channels are to maintain the resting membrane potential and mediate action potential repolarization under basal conditions and in response to changes in the concentrations of intracellular sodium, calcium and ATP/ADP. Here we review the diversity and functional roles of cardiac potassium channels under normal conditions and how heritable mutations in the genes encoding these channels can lead to distinct arrhythmias. We briefly review atrial fibrillation and J wave syndromes. For long and short QT syndromes, we describe their genetic basis, clinical manifestation, risk stratification, traditional and novel therapeutic approaches as well as insights into disease mechanisms provided by animal and cellular models. Published on behalf of the European Society of Cardiology. All rights reserved. © The Author(s) 2020. For permissions please email journals.permissions@oup.