In volvox, glsa is required for asymmetric cell division. If you take glsa out of chlamy and insert it into volvox, it will behave the exact same way. Basics of ncbi and databases: ncbi national center for biotechnology. Information: storage center of all genome, gene, and protein data. In some of the sequences, only small parts show similarity. Differences between global versus local (advantages of each): global alignment, take two sequences and align them end to end, computationally slower; takes a lot longer to do. Local alignment: the algorithm looks for small regions or seeds of high similarity and builds out from there, much faster; can compare one sequence with millions of others in seconds. Synonymous mutations: changes to the nucleotide sequence that do not change the protein sequence. Silent mutations : does not change the fitness of the organism because the protein function is not changing, genes are evolving, but are not changing phenotype.