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Previous research supports the idea that all sea pens anchor to soft sediment using a long, basal, peduncle. The discovery of several pennatulacean sea pen species (rockpens) with an adaptation to bind to rocky substrata alters this understanding. The evolutionary history of octocorals, including these sea pens, has long been poorly understood due to a slow rate of mitochondrial gene evolution and a consequent lack of phylogenetically informative molecular markers to distinguish species. The objective of this project is to analyze three species of rockpens (Calibelemnon francei, Anthoptilum gowlettholmesae, Anthoptilum sp. Alaska) and other octocorals to construct a phylogeny to better understand the evolutionary relationships between these taxa. Using preserved specimens from the California Academy of Sciences' Department of Invertebrate Zoology, the genes of ten octocoral species were analyzed. This project sequenced three protein-coding mitochondrial genes, ND2, ND6, and msh1, and phylogenetic tree construction and analysis were done using Geneious and R Studio. Additionally, SEM photographs of the sclerites were used to morphologically characterize the taxa. We hypothesize that all rockpens actually belong to the genus Anthoptilum and form a monophyletic clade with other species of the genus that do not inhabit rocky substrata. Future research will require investigating how other non-rock inhabiting species in the genus Anthoptilum are phylogenetically related to the rockpens. 

Abstract The Alliance of Genome Resources (the Alliance) is a combined effort of 7 knowledgebase projects: Saccharomyces Genome Database, WormBase, FlyBase, Mouse Genome Database, the Zebrafish Information Network, Rat Genome Database, and the Gene Ontology Resource. The Alliance seeks to provide several benefits: better service to the various communities served by these projects; a harmonized view of data for all biomedical researchers, bioinformaticians, clinicians, and students; and a more sustainable infrastructure. The Alliance has harmonized cross-organism data to provide useful comparative views of gene function, gene expression, and human disease relevance. The basis of the comparative views is shared calls of orthology relationships and the use of common ontologies. The key types of data are alleles and variants, gene function based on gene ontology annotations, phenotypes, association to human disease, gene expression, protein–protein and genetic interactions, and participation in pathways. The information is presented on uniform gene pages that allow facile summarization of information about each gene in each of the 7 organisms covered (budding yeast, roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, fruit fly, house mouse, zebrafish, brown rat, and human). The harmonized knowledge is freely available on the alliancegenome.org portal, as downloadable files, and by APIs. We expect other existing and emerging knowledge bases to join in the effort to provide the union of useful data and features that each knowledge base currently provides.